Bought a used X230 tablet , having some weird issues...

I just got this machine a few days ago. It looks fairly decent, just a few scratches on the lid, peeling paint along the lid edges, and a crack on the keyboard bezel. It came installed with Windows 7 Pro. I attempted to create a recovery disk but Windows refused to let me use a USB device, it would only accept a CD but there is no CD drive in this model and I don't have an external one. On Windows 7, it was running a bit warm and the fan would not stop running, CPU usage was high with svchost.exe consuming large amounts of processor power.

A few days later, Windows 7 decided that it needed to make 208 updates. It took nearly 2 hours to download all of those updates and then it started to install them. It restarted several times then stated that the installation failed and it needed to remove the updates. It restarted a few more times, over the course of a few more hours, and got nowhere. I had to go to bed and I figured that after all those hours, something was wrong and not going to correct itself. I turned the computer off and went to bed. The next day, I restarted it to see what would happen and it went right back to the endless loop of trying to remove the failed updates and restarting. I reinstalled Windows 7 but it wouldn't connect to the internet. I downloaded and installed the drivers from Lenovo and that did not fix the issue. I was tired, honestly, of fighting with it and decided to try installing Windows 10 instead. Windows 10 is working, mostly, with a few issues...

Windows 10 is generally working better than Windows 7 was. The computer no longer seems to be overheating, the fan isn't running constantly, and the CPU usage is within reason so I am glad that it is no having those issues. What it IS doing now is the following: The buttons under the screen, those that manually adjust the screen orientation, refresh, and power off/on do not work correctly. The power button does nothing at all while the other buttons shut off the pc. The power button on the body of the computer does not shut off the pc, even though I made sure that I selected "shut down pc when power button is pressed" in settings.

I also installed Ubuntu, to test the computer with a different OS. The computer generally runs well under Ubuntu, with much better resource management and it stays nice and cool. I have had similar and different issues compared to Windows: When I flipped the screen around and put it into tablet mode, the whole computer would suddenly shut down (it did this every time, and I was not pressing any buttons to cause it.) The same thing happened if I pushed the screen rotation button (when not in tablet mode.) The power button also had issues, often it would not turn the computer on unless I unplugged the laptop and pulled out the battery first, then put the battery back in and clicked the power button.

These issues are all weird to me. I have never owned a tablet convertible laptop before (aside from the week that I had a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 14 that I returned to the store due to buggy behavior and an unpleasant trackpad.) I don't know if the issues in this X230T are caused by the OS or if the laptop needs to be serviced. And therein lies another issue: the computer has a warranty until July 2016 but I don't know if the warranty has been voided by all of the stuff that the ebay seller did to it - he put signatures everywhere that I can see inside of the device (under the battery, on the RAM and next to the RAM, on the hard drive.) I've read that warranties should be transferable and I contacted a Lenovo service rep who said the same thing, I even considered extending the warranty another year, but I have also read that "refurbished" computers are not eligible for extended warranties or transfer of warranty (do they mean, Lenovo refurbished computers or seller refurbished computers?)

Specs I have are 8GB RAM (2x4GB Samsung) in dual channel mode, I upgraded the hard drive to a 250GB SSD Samsung Evo, and i5 processor. I ran all diagnostics that I could, the computer passes all tests thrown at it. I know that I have a lot of questions and info posted here, I just want to get this computer running correctly or (if possible and if needed) send it off for warranty while it's still in warranty. Thanks for any advice/suggestions or just for reading my post.

 

Oh, and I also installed the Lenovo update manager, which made several updates. It updated the BIOS and some drivers and software. I guess tomorrow I will be going through the list of drivers manually to see if anything was missed/out of date. Hopefully that will fix some of the issues.

 

UPDATE: here is where the computer stands now... Previously, when it shut down (when put into tablet mode or when I clicked the screen rotation button) it behaved differently in Linux than it did in Windows. In Linux, it ASKED me if I wanted to restart - so there was something triggering the restart, it wasn't just crashing. In Linux, I was able to cancel the restart and continue working. I've never had a convertible tablet computer before so this is just all weird to me.

In Windows 10... I kept reading and finding other people who had the same issues. I followed their suggestions, apparently there were drivers that I needed that didn't come up under Windows 10 options (on the Lenovo drivers list.) I had installed Lenovo update manager and that didn't detect and install all of the drivers that I needed. I just went through the list of Windows 7 and 8 drivers that didn't have corresponding W10 drivers, I followed someone's instructions for finding the Lenovo tablet manager (it didn't show up when I clicked on the option but it was sitting in a folder, I added a shortcut link to make it easier to pull up later), and I installed Wacom tablet drivers. Now, the screen TRIES to auto-rotate (I am sure that I need to do some more tweaking, I must have missed something), the manual screen rotation button works, and the computer does not shut down when I put it into tablet mode. The power button under the screen now works to start the computer (it did absolutely nothing before.) So, it came down to not having all of the needed drivers. It is possible that some of the drivers that I have that are not working correctly may need to be installed in compatibility mode but I have to figure out which ones those are. (I've had surgery recently so my endurance level and attention span is not what it used to be, I would probably have gotten this all figure out by now if I wasn't so dang tired all the time.)

Oh, and since I am 95% of the way there with getting this working properly in Windows 10, now I need to figure out how to get everything working correctly in Ubuntu/Linux. I know that I have to look up and install some drivers.... I just need to be alert enough to keep reading, lol. If not for the tablet portion of this computer, I think that it would have worked pretty well "right out of the box" with either Windows 10 or Linux, all of the challenges are related to the tablet abilities.