Windows 7: Seven locks up after an hour or so idle

I had this issue and it seemed to come down to the hiding of the task bar. For those that have fixed this lock up by disabling the hiding of the task bar, did you have the task bar in the default location (bottom) or was it moved to the top or the side? I personally have mine on the left side.

I did not try any of ths solutions suggested.
I do need the have autohide taskbar on. I am not going to go through some stupid routine every time I leave my computer to avoid this annoyance. It will be just replacing a stupid thing with another.
I render overnight ( 3D) , or just leave the computer on for a while and, when I wake up my computer ( does not enter sleep mode because it's disabled, it's just the monitor that goes on stand by ) I can see the mouse pointer moving for a few seconds and then it freezes.
I was able to shake it off by opening and closing the DVD tray, can't remember if it had a disc inside or not. An annoyance non the less. But now I don't have a optical drive anymore so I have to shut it down.

Other than this, that I am sure will be fixed, Windows 7 is a great experience, way faster more faster and more stable than my old crammed XP. ( I haven't touched Vista at all ). There are some other settings that I need to fix to customize it to my on liking but I am lazy. I don't like the reflection effect on windows top bars.

Good luck, post any other solutions please.

Use the guide in my sig to update your drivers.

I have the same lockup problem on my new Dell XPS studio. I rebuilt the machine from scratch using Windows 7 64 bit and installed all of the drivers. My graphics card it from ATI and am suspecting that the ATI drivers may be causing the random freezes. I have all power options disabled (i.e. it does not sleep). Even after turning off the sleep options, the machine locks up randomly after 24 - 36 hours of idle time. Has anyone seen this behavior?

Dell XPS? You probably should have used Dell parts.

I Have the EXACT same proble with a new Dell Studio XPS 1645 with Windows 7 Ultimate 64. Looks like I'm not alone...

Hi saw this thread and it prompted me to join the forums, since this seems a pretty common problem.

First had this problem with XP 64bit, when i left it idle it froze and had no choice but to use the reset button on my case. Looked everywhere and tried everything that has been mentioned here; updated drivers, power management etc. XP 32bit never had such a problem.

Now ive recently installed windows 7 ultimate 64bit and the same freeze happens, XP 32bit still stable no problems.

Now this is probably a hardware problem related to the extra strain 64bit OS is putting on my system but i cant pinpoint what it is, also ive run memtest86 for 2 complete passes and no errors, so my RAM isnt faulty...im all out of ideas

I also have the same problem as you guys. I have a Dell Studio XPS 1645, 64 bit Windows 7 pro with the i7 processor and the ATi 4670 gfx card. I also use the hiding taskbar feature. This freezing stuff is so random and I cannot figure it out. It happened on the first day that I got the computer in November back when it had no software on it other than the preinstalled stuff. It just happens whenever and under no particular operating conditions. Sometimes it happens at the login screen before I am able to type in my loggin at boot up. Sometimes it happens when I'm surfing the web, sometimes when I'm looking at my email in outlook. I can load the processor down, or I can barely load it down at all and it will lock up. Sometimes it will lock up if I just leave the computer alone for a few minutes. The worst is if I'm dowloading a file and it locks up. These lockups for me are spontaneous and there is no indication that the computer has locked up at all. No error messages or screen changes at all. The computer just freezes. The mouse doesn't respond and I can't even toggle the light on the cap locks key. Today I've had to restart it 3 times over a period of 4 hours of use. Other days I can use it for 10 hours and it will be fine. I really don't understand what's going on but I really want to solve this baddly! I've updated every driver that I can think of. Windows is completely up to date as well as the Dell provided BIOS. If anyone can help me out I'd greatly appreciate it!

So I've been reading in this thread that the auto-hiding taskbar seems to be the big culprit for causing the lockups. So I turned it off and left my taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen and it locked up again about 15 min later. So I guess that's not the issue!

WOW - same problems i am having. I thought maybe it was a overheating issue but when you hard power it down it comes right back up no problem. It locked up on me twice today. It usually happens at least once a day. The "freeze" is you can do nothing not even ctrl+alt+del. I have to hard power it down. I just updated the bios to A19 (today) I will test it some more. This issue been happening since I loaded this OS. I switched back to my older D620 with Windows 7 no problem at all.

The weird thing is I cannot recreate this problem on-demand & it can never come at a worse time (right in the middle of me doing work-related work) If this continues I may have it reimaged and go back to XP - this is painful

Windows 7
32bit
Ultimate