Timezone and annoying 'lock button key' on new Thinkpad

[RibZed]

Hi

I've just taken delivery of a T540 and just a couple of issues that I thought someone on this forum could kindly help me with:

Not sure why but I can't convince the machine of its 'natural' timezone. I'm located in the UK but it seems to want me to be 5 hours ahead of this timezone. I can amend the clock of course but it even defaulted that -5 value in when I registered for this site. Is there a setting somewhere that I'm missing?

During the initial set-up I was prompted as to whether I wanted to show an indicator for when my Num Lock, Scroll Lock, Caps Lock etc buttons are on or off. I made the mistake of answering 'yes' as I didn't realise it would permanently keep a big black and white blob on the right-hand of my screen as a result. I've looked everywhere but just can't find out where to switch it off - I'm sure it was a Lenovo prompt that initiated it. Please can someone advise me where I could go to switch this off?

Thanks in advance for any help

Rich