Help! My Kindle is Frozen!

[Leslie]

When your Kindle freezes up, it's natural to have a moment of panic. I mean...what's going on? My advice...take a deep breath and relax. It is likely fixable.

You should try a soft reset or a hard reset:

The soft reset is to press the Alt-Shift-R keys at the same time.

For a hard reset, take the cover off the back and insert a paperclip in the little hole. Hold for 10 seconds.

You may need to try again with the Kindle plugged into the charger.

Kindles freeze for a variety of reasons. Most common seem to be: 1) letting the charge run too far down; and 2) pressing too many keys too rapidly, causing the Kindle to become "confused."

Other reasons that folks have noticed for freezing?

Leslie

[Teninx]

I'm pretty sure that one cause of Kindle 'freeze' is an overloaded memory, similar to a computer running out of RAM. The few freezes that I've experianced have come when the Kindle was trying to load up graphic-rich webpages. (Shopping pages, Leslie....not the graphics you're thinking of).

[Leslie]

Hahaha, okay, Teninx! I believe you. 

Seriously, I have heard about Kindle freezes when people are using the browser beyond the Kindle's capabilities.

Leslie

[Mike]

Actually, my experience with the kindle freezing is that it seems to happen after I have not turned it off for two or three weeks. I don't use whispernet (can't get it in my house), and I charge it ever night when I go to bed.

It also seems to happen after I have downloaded several books all at once, i.e. when it is, or has been, indexing books.

The two above are probably connected as I put in several books every few weeks.

My guess is that there is a small memory leak that fills up memory eventually until it freezes.

Mike

[RovingSoul]

My Kindle froze when my brother got ahold of it. He clicked something, it wasn't fast enough for him, and he got frustrated and clicked a whole slew of other things. The poor Kindle was so confused it just froze up completely. It was fine after a simple restart though.

[Teninx]

Kat, you're now the first Kindle owner to have purchased the entire Amazon ebook catalog. Hope your brother is good for it!

[asordu]

Mine froze on me this morning while transferring a book from Kindle memory to my SD card. Messed it all up. Had to delete the book and re-download it. I've also had it freeze while simply changing pages.

There doesn't seem to be any one reason why it freezes, so I'm thinking that the freeze function is on some kind of a timer and when the clock goes down the Kindle goes poof.

[Ann in Arlington]

My opinion on freezing is that Kindle's brain gets full.  I haven't had the problem as long as I remember to do a soft re-set every few days.  Usually I am prompted to because my newspaper isn't there in the morning.  I do a soft re-set and it downloads the paper.  Other than that I never turn the thing off. . . if I'm not reading it's sleeping.

Ann

[RovingSoul]

Kat, you're now the first Kindle owner to have purchased the entire Amazon ebook catalog. Hope your brother is good for it!

Not so much... He just spent every dime he had on a zombies in space game.

[Tbarney]

Thanks for this post, it is how I found your Board a couple of weeks ago.  I am just now coming back to look around.  My Kindle froze right after I charged it.  I tried the hard reset with a paper clip to the hole in the back and it did not work.  I tried the soft reset, alt-shift-r, and it did not work either.  Then I plugged it back into the charger and the soft reset worked.  YEAHHH!!!!!

[stevene9]

Kat, you're now the first Kindle owner to have purchased the entire Amazon ebook catalog. Hope your brother is good for it!

Kat let me know how you like that $6000 Nuclear book. Is it a fast read?   
http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Energy/dp/B001C2TPWO/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I31NLQFURFA6HP&colid=1S9XKDE4KFB4W

[drenee]

I'm bumping this thread up. 

My K1 would not go to the Home page when I tried to take it off of screensaver yesterday.  My indicator would go round and round, but not actually go to the Home page.  I turned it off and tried a couple more times, and nothing.  I could not remember how to do a soft reset, and of course I was nowhere near a computer at the time to look it up here.   I ended up doing a hard reset and now all is fine. 

I'm going to place the Alt-Shift-R code on a piece of paper and slip into each of my covers for next time that happens.

deb

[hillo37]

ok so i've tried everything from soft resets to hard resets and taking the battery out and recharging it for 3 days BUT IT STILL REFUSES TO TURN ON FOR ME!!!!!

I know why it turned off but not how to turn it back on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HELP ME PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[pidgeon92]

How are you resetting it if it does not turn on?

Is it a K1 or K2?

How did you turn it off?

Have you called Customer Service?

[hillo37]

it's the K1 and i used to "ALT/SHIFT/R" thing

i didn't know there was a customer service # that i could call
do you know the #?

[pidgeon92]

Have you tried resetting by using the pinhole reset under the back cover? The Kindle should be plugged in when you do this.

1-866-321-8851, 6a-10p PST, 7 days a week.

More info re: Customer Service is in this FAQ post.

[hillo37]

AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA you are AMAZING!!!!!!!

NO JOKE I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!! AS IN L.O.V.E 

lol jkjk but really thank you so much your hard reset thing did it! thank you!!!!

[jheydt]

My wife has a KK and lately she has been getting freezes with some regularity.   She was not doing anything but reading when this happened, normally after she tried to get out of the screensaver.  We used the reset hole on the back of the Kindle and this fixed it.  However, we never had it plugged in at the time. 

Another question.  I have a K2 and there is no reset hole.   I haven't had a freeze yet but was wondering how would you reset a K2?

John

[LauraB]

With the K2 you hold the slider switch (sleep switch) at the top for 5 seconds to turn off, or 20 seconds, sometimes it takes longer than that, to reset.  You'll know it has reset because the screen will start flashing, then you'll get the message saying it is restarting.  If you sleep it, you get screen saver. Turning it off give you a blank screen and no message it is restarting when you turn it back on (it just turns back on~if that makes sense).

[lbernholz]

Thank you all for this board and advice. I have a K1 that has frozen repeatedly - in the past hard resets have worked. This time - nothing. Customer service was not able to help. Amazon is offering to replace it for free. Just thought I'd let you all know and thank you again for all your help.

[Gimpy04]

Have you tried resetting by using the pinhole reset under the back cover? The Kindle should be plugged in when you do this.

1-866-321-8851, 6a-10p PST, 7 days a week.

More info re: Customer Service is in this FAQ post.

Sound advice. I would still recommend against pushing the pinhole reset button without calling Kindle Support first. Each conversation gets annotated to your account, and it's always good to have this sort of information stored.

[Ann in Arlington]

Sound advice. I would still recommend against pushing the pinhole reset button without calling Kindle Support first. Each conversation gets annotated to your account, and it's always good to have this sort of information stored.

Really?  I guess I don't understand why that would matter.  I mean, if I was having to do a hard reset everyday, I'd be on the phone in a flash.  But I think I've done maybe 6 in the year I've had the K1. . . . And most of those were in the first 6 months.  I have lately been trying to remember do do a soft reset once a month or so;  It seems like that keeps the memory cleaned out and I've only needed one hard reset since January.  But is that o.k. to do, or would it be not recommended either?

Not questioning your expertise, you understand. . . .just curious.  I tend to like to know why things work. 

Thanks for answering questions for us here. . . it really helps!  (Also I am relieved to observe that, so far, you haven't flatly contradicted anything we figured out for ourselves so "whew". . . I'd hate to find out we'd been spreading bad scoopage!)

[hackeynut]

The other thing to try, it happened to me at one point.  The hard reset didn't even work.  I pulled out the battery and just left it out overnight.  Then I went ahead and connected back in the morning and did a hard reset.

Worked like a charm.

[Edward C. Patterson]

Here's how to restart a frozen Kindle DX (I had such a panic moment last wek and called CS, who walked me through it). No more panic.

Hold the top on/off switch sliding it toe the left nd keep to the left, while counting to 80. Release it. Wait a minute - the DX will flash onece or twice (be patient). Then the screen will go black and then the main Kindle screen (the guy sitting under the tree) will apper and the start up thermomenter bar. Once that's completed, the main menu will come on, and your books will be rstored in batches over the next few minutes. If you have a gazillion like I do, it will take four minutes.

And that's it. No cardiac arrest.

Edward C. Patterson

[WinterBorn]

Here's how to restart a frozen Kindle DX (I had such a panic moment last wek and called CS, who walked me through it). No more panic.

Hold the top on/off switch sliding it toe the left nd keep to the left, while counting to 80. Release it. Wait a minute - the DX will flash onece or twice (be patient). Then the screen will go black and then the main Kindle screen (the guy sitting under the tree) will apper and the start up thermomenter bar. Once that's completed, the main menu will come on, and your books will be rstored in batches over the next few minutes. If you have a gazillion like I do, it will take four minutes.

And that's it. No cardiac arrest.

Edward C. Patterson

I think you mean to the right.

Interestingly, I did this when my Kindle DX froze, but nothing happened. Called CS and ended up doing it again (but not for quite that long) and it worked! There was a lag the second time before it flashed and rebooted, but it did flash and reboot, which it hadn't done the first time. So I guess I would add to try this more than once if it doesn't work on the first attempt.

Thanks for posting this. It gave me hope enough so I didn't give up when it didn't work the first time.