I got a new system for Christmas, and it came with Vista pre-installed.  And while it is not the satanic piece of software it has been described as, it has one rather hugely annoying feature:  If left alone for around 15 minutes, it will go into sleep mode; if it goes into sleep mode it will disconnect my internet.

As someone who likes to turn on his computer, start downloading a huge file, and go do something else for several hours, you can imagine my discontent in finding several of the huge demos I was downloading would have to be re-downloaded, and I would have to be on the computer the whole time they were.  This is unacceptable.

I can't find anything about either stopping it from disconnecting or simply disabling sleep mode anywhere, so I thought I'd ask the best and brightest minds I know.  But they weren't available, so I thought I'd ask here (I, kid, I kid..I only tease because I love)

Anybody got any ideas?

i think its your pc not vista, my laptop has vista and never does this

I don't have Vista, but the Sleep/Hibernate controls on Windows are usually in Power Options, in the Control Panel.

Here's how to fix it:

Go to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Power Options. Here will have different "power plans" that you can choose from (mostly for laptop or energy conservation purposes), anyway there's no need to change your plan if you dont want to, just click on "change plan settings" and there will be options like "turn off display after ___ minutes" etc. Just set "Put the computer to sleep" to "never" and viola!

Hope that works, I have vista on both my laptop and my desktop and it's a slightly different process on each one, this should work for a desktop though.

It sounds like what Ultimate Evil said, although you could try and see if there is a hot fix for the poblem here http://aaron-kelley.net/downloads/hotfix/ or one that I have found that seems close to your issue http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931671