What to Do If Your Kindle is Running Slowly or Freezing

Author: Harry Guinness / Source: howtogeek.com

While they’re never the snappiest devices, if your Kindle is feeling sluggish—or freezing altogether—we’re here to help. Let’s look at some troubleshooting tips.

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Check to See If You’re Downloading Anything

Kindles are underpowered devices compared to…well, everything else.

You just don’t need that much processing power to handle eBooks, and most of the time, that’s fine. But, if your Kindle is doing anything in the background, it will probably start running slowly.

The only real background task your Kindle is going to be doing for any length of time is downloading eBooks. If you’re using a slow internet connection or downloading a large number of eBooks at once (or just a single large book) then there’s a good chance your whole device will feel sluggish. Wait for a few minutes until everything’s finished downloading and it should start to run much better.

Note that your Kindle will also have to do some processing immediately after downloading files so it may take a minute or two after the downloads have finished for you to see the difference.

Read the Right Books

Kindles are designed for small, light eBook files. They can handle PDFs, image heavy documents, and even comics, but they won’t do it as well as a more general purpose tablet.

If you’re reading eBooks you acquired from non-Amazon sources, there’s a chance that they might be in a format with which your Kindle struggles. The worst example I’ve ever seen was someone trying to read a PDF scan of a book; every page was an image and the whole document weighed in at over 100MB.

It’s no wonder their Kindle was having a fit.

If you’re going to put different formats of eBook on your Kindle, you should use a program like Calibre to manage and convert them.