HP G61 laptop wont boot- display stays off, caps and num lock indicators blink repeatedly

I had my HP G61 laptop running in sleep for a while. When I came back to it about a half-hour later, it was no longer in sleep mode – the power light and the Wi-Fi indicator light were on (I keep Wi-Fi off becuase I use a wired connection) – but nothing was showing on screen. In fact, the display wasn't even turned on. So I let it sit for about 10 minutes but nothing happened.

I did a force shut down and rebooted. Instead of a normal boot, the display didnt turn on, the Wi-Fi indicator was off, and the Caps Lock and Num Lock lights just blinked repeatedly. On the external keyboard i use, none of the light indicators were blinking or even on. I tried force shut-down again 10 times, then unplugged all connections except for the power cable (my laptop battery dosent hold a charge for more than 2 minutes, so I always must have a wall connection) and tried to boot again but still nothing happened. I unplugged the battery and even then nothing happened. I also tried booting with the disk drive open, and then with it closed again. On the time it was closed, I was able to successfully boot into Windows, but recieved a "Windows did not shut-down sucessfully" notice. Does anybody know why this may have happened?

My PC's specs:

• Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit
• 4GB of physical RAM, 8GB of vRAM (on a flash drive)
• AMD Vision x64 processor (don't know any other specs about it)
• ATI Radeon graphics card, 392 MB
• DVD-R/W lightscribe drive
• 2 External hard-disks (first one is 1.5TB, second one is 1TB)
• custom boot-screen and boot-annimation
• Standard BIOS

apps running before sleep:

• firefox 10.4
• itunes 10.6
• adobe photoshop extended CS5.1
• rockstar games social club (running in background)
• microsoft powerpoint 2010 professional edition
• google chrome

I was NOT running Aero or any fancy themes – I was using the normal windows classic theme. I have a desktop icon manager application called Stardock Fences that was also running (it runs as a service/process).