[ixtab]

Originally Posted by Woodbob

Hi,

I have an 18 month old Kindle Touch. Has been very slow and freezing up. After reading about "Indexing" and typed into search a bunch of letters my kindle said 150 not indexed. I deleted all these entries via the kindle.
I have back ups of the deleted books on my PC!

I did try to find the "Indexing and or Searching" files on my kindle via my PC but - not there...

The actual index files are inside the "system/Search Indexes" directory on the USB partition of Kindle.

Questions - What is indexing????

In one sentence: An index is a special data structure which allows to quickly find documents that contain specific words, without having to search through all the documents again and again. Indexing is the act of building an index and/or processing new documents to keep the index up-to-date. You can find more information about indexes here.

How do I start it??

You don't. The Kindle automatically starts indexing new documents when it finds them.

Can I clear the indexing via the computer and how???

You can delete the abovementioned directory. But the Kindle will only re-build it at the next occasion that it gets.

How do I know it's indexing???

There's no direct way to determine that on the Kindle. But you can just search for some random word - if the device is still busy indexing, it will tell you so.

The indexer is one of the really fragile parts of the Kindle, it seems. I've seen Kindles behave in all kinds of weird ways, like re-starting to index files over and over, without ever getting any further. That's also what seems to happen on your device (150 items left...). This seems to happen very often if you put many files at once on the device. The only known workaround which mostly works is to put files on the Kindle in small batches (like ~ 20 books at a time), and waiting for the indexer to finish. Other than that, you can complain to Amazon and ask them to fix the indexer, or at least implement an option that allows people to turn it off altogether.