# Searching freezes Kindle



## kamikazeee (Jun 18, 2011)

Hi, i  am having a problem with Kindle.

Whenever i SEARCH, in one book, or in entire colecttion  ( i have almost 3000 books), kindle freezes and i have to restart it.


It is understandable when i search entire collection, because of the great amount of books.  But it shouldnt happen when I search inside a book!

help


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Since I only keep 100 or so books on my Kindle at any given time (and archive the rest either via Amazon or external hard drive), I cannot speak to what problems may occur when there are that many books in the search index. Anyway, a couple things I might try, in this order:

1. Check to see if there are any books which could not be indexed (see the first post in this thread for how to do this), and remove any books that could not be indexed to see if that makes any difference. (You can then reload any offending books one at a time, give them some time to be indexed, and then re-test to see if they are still a problem.)

2. Try a restart of the Kindle (Home -> Menu -> Settings -> Menu -> Restart -- *not* Factory Reset!)

3. Move a couple thousand of the books you have no intention of reading in the next year or so onto external storage to see if that helps.

4. Call Kindle Customer Service.


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## kamikazeee (Jun 18, 2011)

NogDog said:


> 1. Check to see if there are any books which could not be indexed (see the first post in this thread for how to do this), and remove any books that could not be indexed to see if that makes any difference. (You can then reload any offending books one at a time, give them some time to be indexed, and then re-test to see if they are still a problem.)


it says:



> You can find which specific book is causing an indexing hang-up via the "Items Not Listed" link when you search, and delete it. Search using a nonsense string. It will return "Items Not Yet Indexed (xx)" where "xx" is the number of items. If after an hour or so the number hasn't changed, click on "Items Not Yet Indexed". Page through the listing and notice if any of the books are shown as grayed out. Note them, go back to home, and delete them the usual way. Then indexing will start.


it implies using search, so i can't do it


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Hmm...I think that's an excellent example of a "Catch 22".  

I guess you could move on to step #2.


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

kamikazeee said:


> Whenever i SEARCH, in one book, or in entire colecttion ( i have almost 3000 books), kindle freezes and i have to restart it.


A search of this size of collection could take a long time, and while the search is running the kindle is effectively frozen. How long have you waited for it to respond? I wouldn't be surprised if the search takes several minutes to complete.



kamikazeee said:


> It is understandable when i search entire collection, because of the great amount of books. But it shouldnt happen when I search inside a book!


Post 9 in this thread http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=107788 explains about the index files. The whole thread is worth reading, a number of people on there are reporting indexing problems with a lot of books.

I've got about 200 books on my Kindle, and the Search Indexes folder is about 50MB in size, of which the master index is 11MB. If you have 3000 books, I'd guess your indexes will be 500-700MB, and the master will be well over 100MB. That's a big database for a little processor to search! 

So my feeling is that if you want searching to work you might have to resort to removing some of the books as NogDog suggests.


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