I want to thank the Dell support guy who explained to me that I purchased an Alienware (no shit, I guess this explains how 3000$ disappeared from my bank account!).
Then he proceeded to explain to me that 1.5 hours battery life, for a 86Wh battery, when the only usage is browsing, is completely normal!
My dude, this bullshit ain't gonna fly with me.

We had a problem like that with Asus. No f-ing idea what the deal was. Found out about it after warranty ran out. People refused to use it for travel. It is now my windows dev machine. Talked to asus about buying battery. They said, "we don't do that".

For myself I went to different brand. They pissed me off.

@Demolishun The first things I noticed is that they had a massive memory leak in the AWCC app that came with the computer. You let the computer run a few hours and suddenly that shit occupies 24GB RAM. Wiped it clean from everywhere (Program Files, ProgramData, Registry, etc.) and installed it from the Microsoft store. Now it's at 25-26MB for the last hour or so, but I will keep an eye on that SoB.
Jesus, what a failure of a company.

especially annoying since batteries usually only comer with a 1 year warranty

Check if you can get gpu clocks stay lower e.g. by reducing resolution or refresh rate. Desktop RTX3080 idles at 9 W https://techpowerup.com/review/...

@RocketSurgeon I had two M17 Alienware, they could last up to 5 hours, even back in 2012, with ~90 Wh. This one is M15, has 86Wh, no way it dies after 1.5 hours. Again, I wasn't mining crypto, I was just browsing.
I went from 74% to 6% in like 24 minutes. WTF.

@electrineer I have RTX3070, and nvidia-smi tells me in normal usage it takes ~18.5W. Still should give me like 3 hours of usage easy.

@NickyBones well that's gpu only. It's not at idle.

If it's Windows, have you checked the energy plans for AC and battery? Shouldn't be max performance on battery.

@electrineer CPU is at 2-4%...it's like <10W. Even with the GPU, should last for 3 hours. I had more beastly Alienwares than this one, and they lasted way longer.

@Fast-Nop I'm on "best battery life" plan 24/7. Trying to save some trees or koalas or something.

Well you bought alienware so....🤗

Can you send it back and buy something else?

That sounds REALLY frustrating.

If anyone planning on getting a new machine. Try one from these guys:

https://frame.work/

@Angry I saw a review of this on YouTube.

Looks sweet.

Just writing a “random justification generator” so that I can persuade myself I really need it..

@Demolishun I am not sure they just let you send stuff back....

@NickyBones you could ask if you can change it to another product if you can't simply send it back

@NickyBones What is their return policy? If it doesn't meet your needs you should be able to return it. Unless you have had it too long. Then your stuck.

@Demolishun I don't think Israel's law of return applies to stuff ordered from the Internets. Not sure about their other legislation.

@electrineer I live in Europe, and purchased it from EU provider. I am just not sure how happy Dell would be to ship a new computer - I'm pretty sure you have to convince them your product it unusable in order to get it replaced.

@Demolishun I had it for about 2 weeks now, and the warranty is 1 year. I will have a call with one of their support guys next week, and we will see what can be done.

@NickyBones there should be no questions asked, it's the law that you can return after trying out. If that wasn't ok for them, they wouldn't ship orders in the first place. And even if they refused to send you a new one, the world is full of laptop brands.

@NickyBones you can return nearly any mail order in EU within 14 days. Guarantee is a separate thing.

The first thing I do with any new laptop is wipe it and start from scratch. They always put so much shite on those things I never know where to start removing it, and a reinstall is often quicker. I've had crappy bloatware that comes with laptops cause everything from memory leaks to hard system lockups before.

@AlmondSauce @AlmondSauce But does it affect the warranty if you wipe it out?
Ideally, I would like to just have Linux on it, but then I am fairly sure they would refuse to do any repairs and such that are within warranty. I am not is the policy for re-installing Windows.

@NickyBones of course the warranty is not affected. And the same applies to all electronic devices. Warranty covers mistakes in the product but not the customer's mistakes. They just don't have to fix you Linux installation.

@NickyBones Doesn't affect the warranty - but these things usually come with a factory reset disk anyway. So if you need to send it back just factory restore it first.

@AlmondSauce and any sensible person would wipe their drive before sending it in anyway

You can just pull a full disk image using Clonezilla and stash that away. In case of real HW problems, restore the image, then claim support.

They advertise with 6:46 (hours:minutes) battery life. That is no where near what your copy will ever be able to do

@electrineer Yeah, but they have arguments like "the hardware doesn't behave as expected because the software is not compatible". E.g, it's not that the battery is messed up, it's that you are not using our superb Windows energy management software.

@NickyBones well you could easily prove them wrong by installing windows temporarily

@electrineer Yes, I could, but I'd just stick with the original Windows for now...when the battery issue is resolved, I'll install Linux.