Weekend of November 30, 2018 – Hour 1

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Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss a new Martian, smartphone shopping on Black Friday, Comcast raising fees, customer service, and more.

Jeff in Columbia, Tennessee listens to the podcast and asked: “I’ve had an HP Touchsmart 300 for years, but mainly used my 27-inch iMac. There’s just a couple programs that won’t work on Mac. The hard drive on the HP started going out, so I installed a Samsung SSD 850 Evo hard drive. I keep getting the message “Reboot and select the proper boot device, or insert boot media and press a key.” No matter what I do, I can’t find the solution. Can “the real geek squad” help me? Thanks, and Hoorah from an Iraq war veteran.“

Jeff, that’s one of the errors that has been driving people crazy for several versions of Windows now.

The error can come from a few different sources. It can mean that you have a computer with that uses UEFI instead of BIOS and it needs to be set to legacy mode to be able to access the hard drive, it can mean that there’s something wrong with the Windows installation itself, or it can mean that the boot order of the drives is wrong.

Assuming you installed Windows on the new drive and set it up so it could be a bootable drive (as opposed to just copying the files over only), you’re probably using just that one, so the boot order shouldn’t be the problem, but you might want to check anyway. It’s a quick check in the BIOS and you may find that when you swapped drives the new one ended up at the bottom of the list and the computer is trying to boot of a DVD drive or USB.

Failing that, it would be good to run a scan on the drive to make sure that everything you transferred from the failing drive actually did make the move. If they old drive was going out and you just cloned one drive onto the other, it’s possible that the new drive didn’t get everything it was supposed to get to be able to boot up.

While you’re there check that you don’t have a “Legacy mode” option, if you do, your computer is probably using UEFI instead of BIOS and you should turn it on to see if fixes things. Unfortunately, this is not an error that has one clear, unique cause, so there may be a little trial and error involved in fixing it.

Jack in Brooklyn, New York listens on Stitcher and asked: “I have a Galaxy Note 8. OK Google works perfectly. But nowhere does it offer to train it “Hey Google”. I already tried uninstalling Google, then reinstalling and then power cycle the device. No help. It didn’t work. Any ideas?“

Jack, if what you’re looking for is a way to set your Samsung Galaxy Note 8 to listen for “hey Google” instead of “ok Google” as the trigger phrase for the voice assistant, you’re out of luck.

Interestingly, the Note 5s allowed their owners to set up Google Assistant to listen for “hey Google,” but the newer Note 8s do not.

The reasons why are not public knowledge, Google says that some phones support using “hey Google” instead of “ok Google” but doesn’t give any more details than that, and Samsung would probably tell us that we’re hurting their feelings and we should use Bixby.

Bixby itself may be the cause, the trigger phrase for Bixby is “hi Bixby,” Samsung may be trying to avoid someone accidentally triggering a better assistant if the phone confuses “Hey” and “Hi.”

Whatever the reason, by all accounts the Note 8 will not listen for “hey Google” to trigger the Google Assistant. Sorry, Jack.

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