The Tech Help Thread

You could try a new cable as that’s cheap.

If that fails, why not just keep it external?

 

You could run diagnostics from your BIOS or other onboard utility to rule out the motherboard at least. Might not tell you about a bad connector, but worth it either way.

 

Is there only one available SATA plug on the board? Try moving it to a different plug if there's one available. If that doesn't work, try using the "bad" drive's cable to plug in your OS drive. If the machine stops booting you know it's a bad cable.

 

@downndirty - a few things:

I would not purchase a laptop from a seller that primarily traffics in something other than electronics - this seller is mostly selling supplements. There's a much higher possibility of a scam or trouble if there's something wrong with the device.

Most SSDs are 2.5", not 3.5". I am not aware of a laptop with a 3.5" drive slot.That laptop does not appear to have a SATA connection at all, let alone a 2.5" drive slot, according to the specs on HP's site. There is one storage connection, and it's an NVMe connection with an M.2 form factor (those are important things if you shop for a replacement drive; it must meet both criteria).

Most new laptops will not have a place for a 2.5" drive except in niche cases. Ironically, your best chance at a 2.5" drive slot is to buy a shitty laptop with a spinning magnetic drive. I'd probably just consider your 4tb SSD to be a permanent piece of external storage at this point, unless you want a desktop.

 

@GTE What app are you using? Each one is different. If you're not using an app, you need to use one to download them.

I use Pocket Casts, which is excellent. But you do have to click the subscribe button on the podcast before you can download them.

 

Should be able to search out the podcasts and download them using any of the major apps - YouTube Music has a podcast section, which I haven't tried. But Pocket Casts is good, and Apple Podcasts is fine if you're in the iOS ecosystem.

 

Yeah, go with something big and mainstream, like SquareSpace. I have zero experience in this, but I'd think that you'd want something easy, that could potentially do things like payment processing, marketing campaigns, etc.

Go and grab a discount code from any one of the million influencers promoting them and give it a shot.

$0.02

 

I would avoid GoDaddy entirely, as I have extensive experience with what a shit company they are.

If you have an existing modern payment processor and POS provider, like Square (which is, confusingly, not related to SquareSpace), it's very possible that they have a e-commerce website builder as part of their toolkit and it may integrate nicely into your existing workflow.

Otherwise, yeah, it's fine to just use something like SquareSpace.

If you want to roll your own landing page, you can go over to Wordpress.com and build your own site pretty cheaply, and you can have a landing page that is distinct from whatever e-commerce page you build with Square or whoever - that is, you can build a "hey this is us, here's what we do, here's our contact info" site that also has a "click here to book a reservation" link that takes you on over to an e-commerce page. This has the advantage of being able to take your landing page with you if you change e-commerce/POS providers.

If your landing page is super simple, this is less important though; you can just rebuild if you change providers.

 

If you're planning on doing payments, be sure to start on the platform that will support your future requirements... moving stuff like this is always painful.