A method and apparatus are presented for compensating drifts in access terminals occurring during a sleep time. The method includes determining whether a sleep time exceeds a threshold, buffering time domain samples containing acquisition pilots and a paging channel, powering down RF circuitry in the access terminal after buffering samples, processing the samples to compensate for drift, and determining whether the access terminal was paged based upon the processed samples. The apparatus includes a digital front end, an FFT engine coupled to the digital front end, a symbol buffer coupled to the FFT engine, a processor coupled to the digital front end, FFT engine, and symbol buffer, and a memory coupled to the processor, the memory further comprising instructions for executing the method.