Among a couple of lots of 7" netbooks I've picked up cheap over the past year or so were two Delstar DS700s. One wouldn't start, while the other had a broken LCD. So I swapped out parts between the two to produce one working unit. The device has a couple of big downsides: in addition to not having the hardware for a sync connection with a PC, it has the huge drawback of wiping all changes in both the registry and file system on each reboot
(except for the flash storage folder, with the weird name "Local Diskc" [no, that's not a typo], in the latter case
). Because of the registry wipe, there's no way to permanently change the shortcut locations to the flash storage folder. Every single reboot is a factory restore.
But there's an interesting feature: when you press and release the power button, a little Windows XP-like window opens saying, "System is shutting down, please standby"
(another misspelling since the verb-adverb phrase "stand by" is two words, as opposed to the one-word noun referencing the device state
), and the display and LEDs shut off a few seconds later. Pressing the power button again brings the display back immediately, and for an instant you see the last screen displayed before going into standby
(there's the one-word noun
) - but then it goes to a full screen display that looks like what you see when Windows XP resumes from standby mode, but with just one word: "Starting......" A few seconds later, the CE desktop reappears in its factory state while the original Windows CE startup sound plays - in other words, another cold restart.
(Pressing the reset button does not produce the same result, instead showing the Windows CE logo followed by the CE desktop.
)
But wait - I stumbled on something while browsing the file system of the device: there's an executable called "PowerOff.exe" in \Windows, and even though I figured it was probably the file executed when the power button was pressed while the device was on, just for kicks I double-clicked on it to see what would happen. Sure enough, the same little "System is shutting down . . ." window popped up, and the screen and LEDs then went off - but then when the power button was pressed again, the device picked up where it left off, without being overridden by the "Starting" screen and restart.
Now, I can already hear Rich saying, "Sure, the screen and LEDs are off, but that's all. Try running an app with a timer and you'll see that the timer keeps running while the device is dark." So I tried that, and guess what - after waking the device several minutes later, the timer was right where it was when I put it to sleep. I also checked the power level several times after it had been in this sleep state for anything from a few minutes to several hours, and in all cases it showed very little drop - in fact, after shorter sleeps, it even seemed to rise slightly, like sometimes when a battery sits partially charged in a powered-off device for a short period.
The executable "PowerOff.exe" is not copy-protected. I was able to copy it onto an SDHC card to test it in other devices. It opens up, but only shows an incompletely-drawn window with no text and a couple of buttons that do not show on the window on the DS700 itself. Nothing happens when either of those buttons is clicked on.
In any event, it appears that there is one 7" netbook that can be suspended. I should also mention that the device seems pretty snappy despite not having the fastest processor
(a 400-MHz Samsung S3C2450
).