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Delstar DS700: A 7" CE 5 netbook with a possible suspend state

CE Geek Page Icon Posted 2014-07-29 10:43 AM
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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).
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Rich Hawley Page Icon Posted 2014-07-29 12:36 PM
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Very interesting.

Does the storage manager in the control panel allow you to delete and create the "LocalDiskC" partition? If so then the naming convention is controlled by that.

Seems the power button must be linked to poweroff.exe. Probably the missing graphics are something located in the Windows file, some hidden bmp image perhaps?

Probably the power on state that resets the device is something set in the registry...
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CE Geek Page Icon Posted 2014-07-30 4:18 AM
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. . . which there appears no way to change. (I tried using a registry flush applet to save the registry, but it still wipes on reboot.)

The suspend appears to be a little quirky, though. A couple of times it wouldn't power back on when I pressed the power button, and then the only way to power it on was to poke the reset button on the bottom.

I'll keep poking around the registry to see if there's anything I can do to make changes stick - but I'm not getting my hopes up, considering that there's almost nothing on the Web about this device.
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CE Geek Page Icon Posted 2014-07-31 4:36 AM
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There are a few other files in \Windows that appear to be involved: shutdown.exe, shutdown_C.exe, and PowerButton.dll. The last of these may be the key file - but it's the only one of the three that's not copyable. The other two open the "System is shutting down" window, but neither does anything else when executed on another device. (Well, the second one does do something - it freezes up the device when run on anything other than the DS700. )

No luck so far with the registry. There don't seem to be any "RegPersisted" values anywhere, nor can I find any .hv files - only default.mky in the \Documents and Settings folder.

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CE Geek Page Icon Posted 2014-08-07 7:03 AM
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Further evidence that this is a real suspend: I resumed the device after it had been sitting unused in the suspend state for nearly a week, and the power had only dropped to 60%.
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Rich Hawley Page Icon Posted 2014-08-07 12:20 PM
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Does the netbook look like all the others you see in structure?
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CE Geek Page Icon Posted 2014-08-08 6:40 AM
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Yep - it's identical to all those no-name CE 5 and 6 netbooks. (Only difference is that the SD slot is inverted internally; ie, the card is supposed to be inserted faceup rather than facedown like on the other netbooks.)
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