Welcome to Trisquel Brian! No problem too l33t or too noob to ask here :)
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, another common cause of suspend/ hibernate problems is insufficient swap space. In Windows, this is sometimes referred to as a "page file" and is just a file on the Windows partition. With GNU/Linux its usual to have a separate partition set as the swap partition during install. For suspend/ hibernate to work, it needs to be at least the size of your physical RAM (I usually go for double if I have plenty of hard drive space).
