PRS-650; occassional freezing, requires Reset button

[Nadrek]

On a reader with 307 collections and some over 3000 books, all on an 8GB Sandisk (cheap blue, not the Ultras or the Extremes) SDHC card, imported from Calibre, I've seen occasional freezing. The most obvious time is when I've been using the reader for some hours, and it's been in and out of sleep mode, then I press Collections; Collections is highlighted... and that's the end of screen refreshes.

I've let it sit for over half an hour, no response. Power button does nothing, either brief presses or for >5 seconds. Pressing the Reset button does help; at this due to impatience time I'm unsure if it's press Reset briefly and wait a couple minutes, or if it's press Reset for >5 seconds and wait somewhat less. Pressing Reset briefly, pressing Power briefly, waiting ~45 seconds, and pressing Reset for >5 seconds and Power for >5 seconds does appear to work after another minute or two.

Has anyone isolated this further?

[babyd]

have you tried loading books on the internal memory and removing the card and seeing how it reacts over a day or two? This way you can isolate if the card is causing issues. If the reader acts normally with no card then it may be your card, or how the reader uses the card. I always found my 505 and 600 acted a bit flaky with heavily loaded cards.....

[Merbear]

mine kept freezing while I was reading a book - couldn't turn pgs unless with the buttons. had to reset it a couple of times and then the reset didn't do anything - everything frozen. Just took it back and replaced it. Hopefully all will be ok. I love the new reader...so much clearer and more responsive than the 600.

Originally Posted by Nadrek

On a reader with 307 collections and some over 3000 books, all on an 8GB Sandisk (cheap blue, not the Ultras or the Extremes) SDHC card, imported from Calibre, I've seen occasional freezing. The most obvious time is when I've been using the reader for some hours, and it's been in and out of sleep mode, then I press Collections; Collections is highlighted... and that's the end of screen refreshes.

I've let it sit for over half an hour, no response. Power button does nothing, either brief presses or for >5 seconds. Pressing the Reset button does help; at this due to impatience time I'm unsure if it's press Reset briefly and wait a couple minutes, or if it's press Reset for >5 seconds and wait somewhat less. Pressing Reset briefly, pressing Power briefly, waiting ~45 seconds, and pressing Reset for >5 seconds and Power for >5 seconds does appear to work after another minute or two.

Has anyone isolated this further?

Well you are pushing it to the outer limits of what it can do. These readers don't have a fast Pentium style processor, so when you load a gillion books into hundreds of collections it is going to slow down and get overloaded at some point.

I understand the temptation and desire to place your entire library on a single device, but I really don't think the technology has quite got to that point yet when it comes to ebook readers. The indexing alone could cause a freeze. I personally think we are better off limiting the number of books to a few hundred at most. Think about it, even if you could consistently read an average of one book every two days it would take you over 16 years to read 3000 books!

These readers were designed for casual reading and not use as a huge library of reference material. They simply do not have the processor speed nor the firmware to adequately handle that task.

[Richey79]

Originally Posted by Nadrek

all on an 8GB Sandisk (cheap blue, not the Ultras or the Extremes) SDHC card

I think there's your problem.

I first tried a bog-standard, el-cheapo SD card with my 600. Even with relatively few books on it (and being a low-capacity card), it locked up all the time.

Changed to a 4GB fast card, and the 600 is barely slower than with no card.

[doreenjoy]

Originally Posted by jswinden

These readers were designed for casual reading and not use as a huge library of reference material. They simply do not have the processor speed nor the firmware to adequately handle that task.

I agree with this.

On my 600 and even my 505, I had frequent lockups while using an SD card with over 2000 books. I finally came to the realization that keeping that many books instantly accessible wasn't realistic.

Now I keep the bulk of my library on my comuter, and I load less than 1000 books on the device, and it works well.

I've also noticed that books with DRM tend to slow down the device more than DRM-free books, but that's strictly anecdotal and I didn't do a thorough study of it.