u/duffano

Hello,

I booked with Ryanair for the first time. In the last 3 weeks since my booking, I received FOUR emails with misleading and unnecessarily frightening subjects:

- "Your flight to Milan is departing soon". WHAT?! Did I make a mistake and booked to Milan instead my actual destination? They even included a wrong booking reference in the title. After asking back it was declared as "just wrong advertisement - we are sorry".

Ok, an error can happen. But then within the next weeks:

- "Travel warning for your destination" -> Shit, what happened there? A "travel warning" comes from government authorities and is issued if there is danger to health and life. Oh, in this email it is actually only standard information on the normal travel documents I need for my destination.

- "You want to change your booking?": What!? Did I request one by accident?! No. It was just information on the possibilities. In fact, for my ticket changes are not even allowed.

- "Warning: Changes regarding passport control.": There are no recent changes. It is just information on the most recent regulations, which are in effect for many months. And in fact do to my citizenship they do not even affect me beyond standard procedures.

Is it just me, or is is this common practice for Ryanair to send messages with misleading and frightening titles?

Dear all,

I am planning to visit Alt-Thera as well as the Akrotiri archelogical site. As far as I know I need a ticket, but despite using Google I have difficulties to find the official way to buy it.

As far as I can tell, this seems to be the official website: http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/3/eh355.jsp?obj\_id=2454. Is this true? However, the website only tells a price, but there is option to buy it. Also, the website looks as if it has not been updated for at least 15 years and I don't know how accurate the information is. I found a few third-party website that sell tickets, but due to bad experiences with third parties I prefer to buy it directly from the service procider.

I am thankful for any help.

Hi,

I recently played Fears to Fathom Scratch Creek and really liked to experience a story together. Before that I only played single player horror games and was not really interested in multiplayer. But as an F2F fan I gave it a chance and now I want more.

Any game suggestions? It should be co-op horror or thriller games with strong narrative elements.

Most games I found so far are more survival than horror and most seems to be just "survive the zombies", "escape the killer", etc. without a real story.

Dear all,

I am playing Civ 7 for about a week now. I don't understand the logics behind lowering the victory points limits. Is there any logics at all?

I was aiming for a science victory. In my first playthrough I arrived in modern age. Someone else (AI player) was ahead in culture and military, while I was ahead in science and economy (but still quite close). Out of a sudden, a message popped up, saying the victory points have been lowered, pushing the culture player slightly above the limit. Then I have 5 more rounds and of course that's not enough.

I started over. This time, I tried to be ahead in all categories to prevent others from sudden victories. This time, it was ME who got an unintentional eceonomy victory. I tried to destroy MY OWN economy in the last 5 rounds because I wanted a science victory. But I did not make it and "sadly" I won (in the wrong cateogy).

This mechanics does not make any sense to me. The game decides when and how much the limit is lowered. It's like car racing with someone deciding at an arbitrary point that the one currently ahead won.

Am I understanding anything wrong? Or are there any thoughts about it?

Dear all,

two questions about Expedia's "pay on site" option:

1. Did you ever use it and did it work well?
2. Do hotels normally actually charge only on site, or is it normal that they try to charge or at least block the amount before?

Only if you are interested in the background of my question: Due to past experiences, I am undecided if prepayment or pay on site is less risky:

• A hotel did not give me rooms due to overbooking but still did not want to pay back. The staff did not even see a problem with "renting thousands of rooms and give them to the ones who arrive first" (their own words). They were obviously, let's call it, "not normal". That's why I avoid prepayments whenever possible.
• The year after, I booked using "pay on site" but had problems of a different kind. Two hotels still tried to charge my card before arrival and the payment failed. I don't know why, but I guess it's either because the whole thing happened in China (where western cards sometimes fail in general), or because prepayment was never part part of the contract and therefore not approved. The hotels threatened me to cancel the booking while I was already on the way and I could keep it only because local (Chinese) friend intervened.

Dear all,

I recently got an IdeaCentre Mini 01IRH10R Type 91B2 (Intel Core 7). It works in principle. However, it sometimes gets stuck on the Windows startup screen (the one with the rotating circular loading sign). I did not make any changes compared to the factory settings that commonly cause such system issues, the only installs are mainstream and minor (MS Office, printer, Google Chrome, Windows+Lenovo updates). All Hardware tests passed (CPU, memory, storage). After hard reset (holding the power button for a while) the next start usually succeeds, although two failures in a row also occur rarely (on a random basis).

The important word here is: **sometimes**. And as far as I can say it is not related to any specific activity such as a recently installed update. Even after normal usage (or immediate shutdown after startup), the next start may fail or not. However, I noticed that enabled fast book or (independently) a plugged in USB WLAN stick seem to significantly increase the frequency of this boot problem (about every second boot fails). Btw., the WLAN stick is used gives me better signal than the the builtin WLAN adapter, and while it increases the liklihood of boot failures, it is is not the original reason because I observed the problems already before I instealled the stick.

Just in case this has anything to say, I also noticed that independently of whether it gets stuck or not, the startup shows up in different shapes. Sometimes I see the Lenovo logo with the rotating circle, sometimes I see the Windows logo instead, and sometimes the screen remains black until the Windows welcome screen shows up.

Any ideas what could cause the issue or how I can analyze it further?

Dear all,

this is my honest feedback on the recovery tool. It is very poorly implemented. One repeatedly encounters obstacles that seem deliberately designed to make the recovery as difficult as possible.

You can't simply download the recovery media as an ISO file. Microsoft manages to provide one for plain Windows, which I tried but left me with a non-useable Lenovo machine (it seems most of the hardware requires drivers not included in the OS); also LAN/WLAN did not work, which made it impossible to install the drivers afterwards.

So, you have to use Lenovo's image that includes the drivers. However, to get it, you need a dedicated download tool. This tool is only available for Windows. And for some inexplicable reason, it requires administrator privileges (even though this only downloads the file, not installs it).

Lenovo has apparently completely forgotten one crucial point: If you want to perform a system recovery, your computer is usually not working!

You can't download the image using a Linux live distribution (the tool only works under Windows; according to the error message, it even deliberately refuses to work under Wine emulation). You also can't use it on a public computer (since you normally don't have administrator privileges there). Without external help, you can't perform a system recovery. And even if you painstakingly manage to obtain the image from somewhere, it insists on resetting the **entire** disk (and not just the system partition). Any second operating system or data partition would also have to be completely reinstalled.

My only question is: WHY?
It would have been so simple. Offer an ISO for download and that's it. It works with any browser, and they wouldn't even have had to develop their own tool.

Dear all,

I bought an IdeaCentre Mini 01IRH10R (Type 91B2) with an Intel Core 7 240H.

While the PC is otherwise good as expected, the noise level is disappointing. After turning it on, the fan immediately makes noise comparable to a small USB table fan. After Windows booted up, it gets more quiet (I think fan control only works after the OS was booted up), but unfortunalty after about 10 minutes when the device gets warmer it is getting even louder than during boot time, now comparable to a large room fan. This is even the case when the machine is mostly idle with a CPU usage <10% (only reading news websites, typing in Word, or even with no user program open at all). I know that the CPU is quite strong for a mini PC and I did not expect it to remain silent on heavy load, but during low CPU usage the noise level surprises me. For comparison: my other PCs bought during the last 15 years were all high-end at their time, and even they are barely noticeable while idle.

Is this normal for the Lenovo IdeaCentre? Any ideas if it can be fixed?

Btw., the BIOS lets me choose between balanced, performance or full mode. But unlike written on some Lenovo websites, there is no quiet mode.