Customize your Fire TV Stick experience with some of these advanced settings.

Once you have finished the initial setup of your Amazon Fire TV Stick, there are many useful or necessary settings to get the most out of your streaming experience.

If you have a data cap on your internet usage, you might want to be notified before you go over your limit. It's also good to know other seemingly easy tasks, like turning off your Fire TV Stick, forcing an update, or putting the Fire TV Stick to sleep.

We'll show you some of the advanced Settings on your Fire TV Stick.

There are a couple of ways to display the Settings menu. Go to the gear icon in the header on the homescreen.

Bring up the Quick Menu by holding down the home button on the remote for 3 seconds.

Or, you can say, "Alexa, launch settings."

.And there are many more tips and tricks available on Fire TV.

The Fire TV's Live TV Guide lets you see all your linear live TV channels in one guide. Taking a little time to set up your favorite channels from each of the sources will save you time from scrolling through channels you never watch. Also, by going through the list of channels, you won't get the same channel from two different sources.

At the top of the home screen is a banner with feature content—shows and apps that are trending or you might like. A video plays with sound. Listening to a looped repeat of the preview can get annoying after a couple of rounds. Luckily, you can turn off the video and audio.

If you watch Prime Video on other devices as well as your Fire TV, you'll want to be able to pick up where you stopped playing on the other device. While it should be turned on, if you aren't seeing what you watched on Prime Video, you might want to check that this setting is turned on.

Many apps have add-ons like content purchases, premium subscriptions, or additions to games. To prevent children or others from making purchases within apps, toggle this setting to off.

If your internet provider limits the amount of data that you can use each month, you might want a notification when your data usage is getting close to the point where you may be charged. Although you may have set this up during the original set up process, you can turn it on or off, or change your data limits.

The Fire TV Stick includes a few features to make it more accessible for people with aural or visual impairments. This includes closed caption subtitles and Audio Description, Voiceview (to read out words on screen), high contrast text, and more.

To enable any of these options go to Settings > Accessibility

At times, you might want to start over and set up your Fire TV stick again. Or, you'll want to erase all of your personal information including app logins if you give away or sell your device by reverting it to the factory defaults. Note that if you are having issues with your Fire TV, first try restarting or unplugging your device for 30 seconds, as you don't want to go through the setup process and download your apps again.

The device will then start the reset procedure, which takes about 10 minutes. Once it is done, you will see the same prompt to pair your remote that you saw the first time you set up the Fire TV Stick.

Amazon releases a software update for its Fire TV Stick every few months. In all likelihood, your Fire TV Stick will automatically download this update during its periodic checks, and apply it. Occasionally, an update won't roll out to your model right away and you may be able to update it by checking for the update. Also, if your Fire TV has been disconnected from the internet or power for an extended amount of time, you may want to check for updates when you reconnect it.

Here's how to check if you are running the latest version of Fire OS and how to update the Fire TV Stick if necessary.

The Fire TV Stick will then check for updates. If an update is available, you'll be asked for confirmation to apply it.

Once the update is applied, the Fire TV Stick will restart automatically.

It may seem odd, but many streaming players never actually turn off. But, they do go into a low power "sleep" mode after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Here's how to manually put the Amazon Fire Stick into Sleep mode:

If you want to turn off the Fire TV Stick so that it does not use any electricity, you will need to unplug its USB power cable from the outlet.

The Amazon Fire TV Stick doesn't have a physical power button. Be sure you have enabled HDMI CEC on your TV. Pressing the home button on the remote should switch the TV to the Fire TV's input.

These are some of the settings you are most likely to need and as you can see, they are straightforward and pretty easy

It's more enjoyable to use your Fire TV when it is customized the way you like it.

Barb Gonzalez started writing about technology when she looked at the back of an AV receiver and thought, “How will anyone be able to figure this out on their own?” She’s written and illustrated two books, “The Home Electronics Survival Guide,” and “Home Theater Made Simple,” and worked for numerous websites reviewing and simplifying technology. Barb has an insatiable curiosity about tech and a goal to make it accessible to everyone. When she’s not writing, she loves going on long hikes with her corgi, photographing stunning nature photos.

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