Thinkpads Forum

I just received my new (old) X230, purchased off ebay. Despite what was supposed to be very good condition, it has the following issues:

o The cover that goes over the external status indicator lights is missing. (top casetop when the unit is closed) Is this just a transparent film or a piece of plastic? Is there a PN for it or some way to replace it? Is there any risk to the exposed LEDs and electronics below without it?

o The unit was supposed to have bluetooth but does not. Can I just add an internal bluetooth card or does this need to come combined with the wireless card? This unit has the N6205 card installed. Any recommended PNs?

o Despite being indicated in v. good condition, the paint appears to be chipped off all along the top front edge where the thinkpad closes. (the lip) I've never seen that on other units that I've purchased. Was this a problem with the X230 due to it's latchless closure or rather a sign that this particular unit wasn't well treated? A few scratches I expected, but not to have the paint chipped off.

o Unfortunately this unit came with French Win7 (with the COA). It didn't come with recovery discs. So do I just need to download the Language Pack from MS (rather than the LIP) to run it in English?

o The unit has a wireless WAN indicated in device manager. Will it accept any SIM card or is this tied to France or any specific provider?

o Is there a way to test the machine as I used to do with PC Doctor on my T61, X61, etc? I tried the Lenovo Solution Center but it does not seem to test much. Is there any program that will check the hardware or do I need to check each thing manually?

So far, I checked:

o no problems indicated in Solution Center
o no problems indicated in device manager
o Power Manager shows that the battery has close to design capacity (40.24 vs 40.44 on the 6cell), though it has 265 cycles !
o bios is not locked
o I can run Memtest on the memory and Drive Fitness test on the HDD

I dislike starting out with unexpected problems and so if I can't resolve the issues quickly, I wonder if I'm better off returning the unit.

Many thanks for any suggestions any of you can provide.

I'd be interested in the answers as well. I just bought an X230 tablet off of Ebay and it has a crack in the keyboard bezel (it was not indicated in the ad but if you know it's there, you can sort of see an indent in one of the photos.) The paint on mine is also chipped all along the edge of the lid. There are a few scratches on the lid, I expected that, but the chipped paint was not evident in the photos (not something that affects functionality so I don't care too much but it could be similar to what you are seeing.) When looking for units to bid on, many photos showed damage like this.

I also saw that mine has a wireless WAN card (a pleasant surprise) but I don't know what to do with it, lol. I will be googling some more. I see where the SIM card is supposed to go, I have read a bit on this already as I was interested in getting a data plan for the laptop. I did read that these cards are only good with Verizon, ATT, and one other company (Sprint?) I have read conflicting info about whether it has to be a data-only card, some people are claiming that they used their cell phone SIM in the laptop (I might try this tomorrow, I have a Verizon talk and date plan.) Hopefully someone who knows this feature will respond before I start experimenting, lol.

I used Windows system tools to check the harddrive and memory. Then, I ran the Lenovo Solution Center diagnostics, it looks pretty thorough. If you want to make sure that everything in the system is performing as intended, you might have to test some things manually.