Be Safe with computers and Kindle

[tarke9891]

The notes talk about, "Safely eject your Kindle from your computer." Is this pointing the unmount of the usb from windows or is there another program I missing? I thought it was hot swap.

BTW Thanks a lot for what you guys do. I don't have my kindle until the day after it works with it

[s0litaire]

USB supposed to be "hot-swap"

The "safely eject your device" is there to let the OS know you want to remove it so it writes all the data it needs to and closes any links to open files and dies a tidy up.

Operating systems tend not to write everything to as disk or USB device when you write data to the device.
They hold back from between a few milliseconds to a few mins before writing the data to the device.

Technically it's to keep down the overhead of constantly reading and writing to a slow device (To your OS; doing many small read/writes to a USB is a lot slower than saving up all the changes and doing them in bulk)

To be safe always right click on the Kindle entry in "My Computer" in Windows and select "Eject".

there's also an icon in the taskbar you can left click on to unmount the device

[Tiersten]

Originally Posted by s0litaire

To be safe always right click on the Kindle entry in "My Computer" in Windows and select "Eject".

there's also an icon in the taskbar you can left click on to unmount the device

They're not the same. Ejecting the drive keeps the USB connection open still. Removing the device from the Safely remove hardware notification icon closes that connection.

Normally they give you the same end result but some of the underlying behaviour changed in Vista and above.

This means that if you're on Vista or 7, you have to eject the Kindle from Computer if you want to get it out of USB Drive Mode whilst still charging. If you remove it from the Safely remove hardware list then it will stay in USB Drive Mode.

If you're on XP then you have to do it from Safely remove hardware.

Its all mentioned in the Kindle manual in section 8.3.

[tarke9891]

Thank you for clearing that up. Still waiting on the K3. Called amazon when it don't show up in the mail, hoping i get it by Wednesday.

[Tiersten]

If you're just charging it and haven't actually copied anything to the Kindle manually that session then just unplugging it should be safe.

If you have copied something then you should eject it to be 100% certain that its written everything.