A while ago the WiFi stopped working completely on my e-ink Kindle. It wasn’t just that it wouldn’t connect to my wireless network any more, it wouldn’t actually see the wireless network and it didn’t show the device as even having a MAC address. This was fairly serious but fortunately I was able to perform a hard/factory reset that solved the problem. If you’re not sure how to do this, it’s simple:
Menu->Settings->Menu->Reset to factory defaults
A reset to factory defaults solves pretty much every problem you can imagine on a Kindle, even the ones that a soft reset won’t. When the WiFi stopped working again a few months later I was irritated but not unduly so because I knew I could simply do the factory reset again. Unfortunately this time it didn’t work. It wasn’t simply that the device reset didn’t solve the problem; that would have been irritating enough in itself but this time the device wouldn’t actually reset. I could still navigate the menu system and select Reset to factory defaults but unfortunately nothing actually happened- my Kindle went on working as though I hadn’t pressed anything. It was a puzzling conundrum and one I spent a long time looking at solving to pretty much no avail.
Eventually I spotted a forum post that detailed a rather abstract way of doing a hard reset and I wrote this blog post called Reset to Factory Defaults won’t work on my Kindle. Since I wrote about my method for sorting out the hard reset issue, I’ve had thousands of views of the post and a lot of comments saying thank you for solving my problem, which is nice as it was pretty much the entire reason for writing the post. However… it’s been a nagging thought that people who have had WiFi issues with their Kindle might not necessarily Google for a solution to what could be an associated problem.
So if you’ve not already impatiently clicked on the link to the related blog post, or you haven’t tried a hard reset to sort your WiFi related Kindle woes out, that is your first port of call. If, like me, on subsequent reset attempts, your Kindle won’t actually reset, what you need to do is go into the settings again, this time to the second page, and select the menu option Device Password. Assuming you haven’t got a password, you should set a password and then turn your Kindle off. When you turn it on again and are prompted for a password, simply type (without the speechmarks) “resetmykindle” in the password field. Please note that you do not have to set the password as resetmykindle, you can set the password as whatever you like, entering the phrase “resetmykindle” is a built in back door to allow those forgetful people who have set up a password but can’t remember it to reset their device. Once you’ve entered resetmykindle, your device will perform a factory default and your WiFi should now work again!
I hope this has been of help to you and I apologise if you’ve come here after reading my existing post; this is really just an attempt to help more people who might not have considered lateral search terms to solve their problem!
