Thinkpads Forum

So I took the plunge and upgraded from the meagerly durable Mini 12 to the fancy x301.

Specs:
u9400 1.6 Ghz, 4 gb's of ram in bios (only 3 show up in vista for some reason), 64gb slc ssd, dvd-rw.

Since getting it yesterday (open box) I have really liked it so far with a few criticisms that are probably fixable. Also I may have some issues with the computer since it has a few unknown things in device manager(headphone jack doesn't work, some "fn" shortcuts don't seem to work, and the speakers are distorted when I raise the volume above half way).

1. The fan is running now, not loud or annoying but is it needed, should I add tpf control and turn it off?
2. The brightness as people have previously stated is either super bright or slightly dim, I can't find an between. Do I need to change some display settings?
3. Is there a way to turn off bluetooth but not wireless internet?
4.Any other tweaks

Thanks!

Your x301 has around dozen backlight levels - you can not increase its levels.

I set tpfancontrol to stop fan until 60 degrees and then use fan on level 1.

You can increase the low contrast by change settings in display settings > intel control panel. I just put gamma and brightness to lowest level for all colors and did not changed contrast level. It increased the low contrast somewhat.

Greetings & Welcome To The Forum!
Based on the comment "open box" that indicates to me that you bought it used, from the Lenovo outlet, or other source. Based on the experience you mention, one choice I might make would be to use rescue & recovery to restore the computer to it's "new out of box" state. This could take care of all the issues. I'm currently using an X301 after having an X300 for awhile and have not experienced the issues you report. A reload of the OS via the rescue & recovery option is a quick way to start fresh with a baseline from which to work should anything go wrong after that.
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Cheers...

The 3GB available memory is due to the use of 32-bit OS.

I agree with archer6 that a restore may be helpful if yours is a used one.

The brightness of the screen is definitely adjustable and more than enough for me in normal workspace.

You can selectively turn off the bluebooth while keep the wifi on by pressing Fn+F5, and selecting from the dialog.

Under vista, do not forget to turn off automatic defrag, disk indexing.

As for 4GB of Ram, I looked into the issue before buying mine X301 and found out the following.
Irrespectivelly of amount of RAM system sees it utilizes maximum possible amount but not all of 4GB. The actual amount utilized depends on the system configuration, 32 bit does not have enough resources to address all 4gb, but it may be able to adress for instance 3.5 gb +/-. Hence even though you will not get full benefit of 4gb, having 4gb is better than 3gb.