Shortly after receiving my eo i7210 UMPC from TabletKiosk, I tested out whether everything worked out okay when I put the PC to sleep using Windows XP's hibernate feature. This feature will serialize the state of memory to disk and completely power off the PC saving battery compared to a standby. Then when you power the machine on, it quickly boots back to the state it was originally in. In other words you don't have to restart all your apps and reopen all your documents, etc.

Hibernation can be a problem though if some of the software on your PC doesn't cooperate. The OS tells the apps when it's suspending them and later resuming them. But if they don't act appropriately, you can end up with an application that gets very confused and ceases to function properly after a resume from hibernate.

It just so happens that a fairly critical function of the eo i7210 failed the hibernate resume test for me.

When you press the SRS button on the front of the UMPC (that's the Ctrl-Alt-Delete button), instead of getting the task manager or something similar, TabletKiosk has programmed the system to launch a popup window that is called the ECS System Management Master (SMM) and looks like this:

It's pretty self explanatory. It's what allows you quickly to switch screen resolutions, rotate the screen 90 degrees at a time when you are in 800x480 mode, and enable/disable bluetooth, wireless networking, and the built-in camera all without having to navigate various control panel dialogs. As you can see from the capture, I'm running in 800x600 mode, the bluetooth radio is off, wireless network on, and the camera off. It's a very useful little app.

But if you hibernate, resume, and then you press the SRS button, instead of getting the SMM application, you get the Windows task manager.

This is clearly a bug, and one that TabletKiosk has acknowledged and will likely fix. But unwilling to live with it, I expermented and found that you could kill the application named SMM.EXE in the Windows task manager's process list, restart it from the Start menu, and then it would behave as it did before the hibernate/resume.

Unsatisfied to do this by hand after each hibernate/resume, I wrote the following batch script, saved it as a .BAT file, and could then run it after a hibernate/resume by double clicking it in explorer (or entering the path to it on the Start -> Run dialog box, etc.

   taskkill /f /t /im SMM.EXE
   RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,ShellExec_RunDLL "C:\Program Files\ECS System Managment Master\SMM.exe"

Still, running this by hand can be a nusiance when you have just hopped in the car, reawake your PC from a hibernation slumber, and are already rolling before being able to run this little script.

Well, there's a simple little freeware application named Hibernate Trigger, written by Nate DiSimione that saves me the trouble of executing the script. This app simply monitors for a Windows suspend/hibernate and subsequent resume and will execute a program of your choosing at each event.

Install the app. When asked tell it to start Hibernate Trigger when the system is started run it and enter the full path to your batch script. The user interface of this app is very spartan. You'll have to type the name of the batch script since there's no browse button. Plus if you enter something in the Suspend field, they you may not be able to clear it (a bug in the tool). Also, before testing it exit the app to ensure the settings are saved, then restart it.

Now, I can hibernate, resume, and my SMM restart script will be run automatically.

Unfortunately, I don't know if this works when using Fast User Switching to allow multiple users to simultaneously log in. I haven't tried this. Frankly, I've had far too many problems on my laptop in the past trying to mix Fast User Switching, Hibernate and 3rd party drivers. It just isn't worth the trouble to me, so my wife and I manage to do everything as one user.

I'm pretty sure TabletKiosk will come up with a real fix for this issue, but for the time being I'm happy.