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

This happens everytime I leave my laptop downloading something, Seven just locks up and freezes (I can't do anything, be it move the mouse or ctrl+alt+del), when I leave it and take a look after a while it's already frozen, so I've never caught the locking up.
Any ideas?

Have you checked the event logs to see if it's picked anything up? Checked the problem history?

(type problem in the search bar and select view problem history)

In problem history all I found were unexpected shutdowns (I killed the power when I saw it froze), if you want I can post the event log for 2AM-11AM, but it's pretty large (3mb). I'll skim through it now.

Hello Funnycat,

you may want to check your power setting to see if this could be relelated to an attempt to go into sleep mode - this has caused quite a few issues since early vista days - Check out he tutorials / threads here for Sleep issues you may also want to check on Vista Forums as it has been discussed extensively here

Yeah, that's the very first thing I checked - it's not the power settings. The power plan is high perfomance and it's configured not to go into sleep mode/hibernation/turn off display/hard drive. Also I tried to manually go into sleep mode and hibernation - they work as designed.

Hi funnycat,

as this is download related it may be worthwhile to check that the power settings on the network adaptor in the device manager are not set to allow windows to shut of the adaptor to save power No reason why this would cause a screen blackout but is something that needs eliminating

what happens if you just leave the machine idle (not downloading) ?

And is it something specific you're trying to download or anything? Have you cleared all your temp files/cache. I'd run a through scan with an AV just to eliminate that possibility.

Downloading or moving files around in Windows 7 seems to stress the memory controller more than it did in Vista. I had to raise my MCP,FSB and Ram voltage to get my system to be stable when moving files around on Windows 7.

The same system has Vista on another partition and had no such problems moving files around. Others have had the same type of problems which a voltage correction fixed. The other thread about this is around here somewhere.

If you have access to these settings in bios you might want to bump up those voltages just a notch and see if it helps. Thats all I can think of for now.

Barman58, Done, thanks
Airbot, nothing specific, just a couple of large .AVIs
chev65, There are no such options in this laptop's BIOS

Thanks guys, I'll leave it idle overnight and tell you the results.

Mmkay, reporting in - overnight idle went successfully, without crashes, freezes, etc, in the morning the system was fully operational. Maybe it's uTorrent that does this, I'll try to leave it on.