Whenever the computer is left unattended for more than 20 minutes while open in Archive Invoices, it freezes up, and the only way to close out of anything at that point is through Task Manager. My computer is only 1 1/2 years old and has XP. Is this a software or hardware glitch? Any suggestions?

Hi Cheryl,

Well, first of all, what operaing system are you using, and how muchmemory do you have installed? Also, what other applications do you have open when you leave your machine?

Windows Vista will start indexing your hard drive after some amount of inactivity, and it can be a while before you can get its attention when you return. Are you sure the machine has really "frozen"? Can you switch to other tasks? If you add "I/O bytes read" and "I/O bytes written" to the columns displayed in the tak manager "processes" window, is any other process ually doing anything?

I have Windows XP Professional with 512 MB RAM. There are no other programs running when this happens. Just a note - another computer in the office does the same thing - none of us have Vista. (Our office computers are networked.)

Hi, Zoe,

It sounds like there is some kind of 'time out' setting for inactivity on your computers that would be causing the problem. Do you have someone there that can check into this for you?

In the Windows Control Panel, under Power Options, make sure the "Turn off hard disks" and "System standby" are both set to "never.

Add at least another 512 Mbytes of RAM, and perhaps move to 2 GBytes. 512Mbytes is really only enough room for XP.

Power Options are good. We increased the screen saver to 30 min timeout which seems to have helped. We'll look into expanding the RAM if we still have problems. Thanks for you help.

I'd also recommend that people be encouraged to exit all their applications when they go for lunch. Leaving an applicaiton open and the machine unattended is a bad idea if you value your data.