Brightness, connectivity, other issues

[argus12]

Hello,

After having a poor experience with Arch linux, I've decided to simplify life for myself by going with a fuller distro. I went with Fedora KDE 64 bit on a Samsung n145 netbook. I'm hoping you guys can help out.

Problem 1: Brightness.

At first the fn + up/down key was recognized, but did not affect brightness levels. I did some research, found a solution, and now I can control brightness on my netbook. However, the maximum brightness is very, very dim. Even sitting in a fairly dark room the dimness causes eye strain. During the day, the screen is virtually unusuable. I know the brightness level is abnormally low because I've seen it much higher in windows. This is a matte screen, so it's not a problem of reflectivity. The highest brightness here is like the lowest was on windows Any ideas?

Problem 2: Strange connectivity issue.

I've never seen this before. My wifi works fine, updating through yum works fine, watching youtube videos, loading webpages, it all works. Except not always on the first attempt. When I open up new tabs, as a rule it will say could not connect, but when I hit refresh, it works. The same happens when trying to get a new theme - the first time that I open up the page, it says network error 3. A second attempt always works. Any ideas as to what may be causing this?

p.s. this just happened when trying to post this thread, thankfully I always control-c all my forum posts before navigating away from the page :P

Minor issue 3: Bottom bar is slow to respond.

Sometimes when I'm doing something in firefox, and want to open up thunderbird by clicking on its shortcut on the bottom bar in KDE, nothing happens. I then notice that the clock won't respond, the fedora launch button won't respond... and then 15 seconds later thunderbird launches, and everything is responsive again. I know I'm using a netbook with an atom processor, but this is still strange, since I wasn't exactly taxing the hardware with one or two open tabs in firefox in the first place

Very minor issue 4: When I configure my desktop for search & launch, and choose to have weather displayed rather than a background image, nothing happens. I just get a blue background. Waiting doesn't seem to help.

Thanks for any help guys.