System Takes Forever To Wake Up

I had two issues with this laptop - first, my battery was no longer accepting a charge unless i turned the laptop off, took the battery out, put it back in, then turned the laptop back on again.I seem to have fixed this issue by updating the bios. It has been charging normally for a few weeks now.The other issue has me completely stumped.It has been doing this for several months now and just seems to be getting worse. When I put this laptop to sleep... if i open it up within an hour or so, it wakes up just fine in no time. If i put it to sleep (it is set to sleep when the lid is closed) and then wake it up the next day (or longer), it takes up to ten minutes to find itself. It's the strangest thing. The screen comes up right away, and you can see all of the programs running - but the system is thinking and thinking and pretty much unresponsive for about 5-10 minutes each time. It's like it has lost itself and takes that much time to remember what the heck it was doing last time it was awake. Once it finds itself it's perfectly fine again.