<p>The Amazon person walked me through a slightly different fix. He said something about pushing over & holding the start button for 30 seconds and then IMMEDIATELY plugging it in to recharge. He then said to keep it charging for hours until the light turned green. It was the first time we got it off being frozen and showing at least a yellow charge light.</p>
<p>Hope something works, but maybe you could try that. Oh yea, he also had me double-check the charger by trying it on a cell phone to be sure it wasn’t the charger that had gone bad.</p>
<p>Thanks Himom - I’ll give anything a go. I’ve tried the other fix at least four times (with resting time in between). The charger appears to be fine, but my son has the same gen so we could go through the process with his charger I guess. The screens not blank, it’s got the black and white lines. Just so pitiful…</p>
<p>I have been buying refurbed things for decades from Apple and they have the same warranty & quality as brand new.</p>
<p>I also have an ipod nano which is seven years old and works great as well as a blackberry that is functional of the same vintage except for the speakers which always were aproblem. Something as basic as a Kindle should last longer than a couple years.</p>
<p>I was thinking of getting a kindle myself, because I use my ipad & iphone for reading, but I think I would use something kindle or ipad mini sized even more- but want to wait for the retina screen.</p>
<p>I can see however, that it is a real disadvantage not having a local repair shop.
Last year, I took my iphone swimming & even though it was out of warranty, it was replaced at the Apple store with a new one exactly the same for $100.( I had the 32 gb model) I thought that was a pretty good deal.</p>
My iPhone died within a year with a problem in the internal circuitry (i.e. it wasn’t dropped or abused). Luckily, it failed within the warranty period so they just replaced it with another one and the replacement one has worked fine for years (it’s a first gen).</p>
<p>Things can go wrong with any electronic device.</p>
<p>Luckily my Kindle is still working fine so hopefully it’ll last at least until I’m looking for an excuse to upgrade to a newer model.</p>
<p>OP:
IMO the Kindle Fire isn’t the equivalent of a ‘normal’ Kindle, i.e. an e-Ink version. While it’s nice that the Fire is color and has real browsing capabilities it doesn’t have the super long battery life and more natural paper type screen of the normal Kindle. The Fire is more similar to a Samsung Galaxy tablet, Google Nexus tablet, or iPad mini. It’s something to consider when looking for a replacement - do you want an all around tablet with the shortcomings of a shorter battery life and LCD screen or do you want the device just for reading where the longer battery life and more ‘reader friendly’ screen would be preferred?</p>
<p>^ I agree GGD, they are two different products and need to be looked at in that way. E-reader vs a tablet with an e-reader app.</p>
<p>Thanks for the video link ek4. I’m not too handy, but was able to follow along. I have several techies in the house who could do this (if DH can open up the dryer diagnose and fix it via youtube videos, I think he can do this). I’ll have to decide if I want to invest $55 into parts with the hopes of resurrecting this one.</p>
Something as basic as a Kindle should last longer than a couple years.</p>