Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I got this 2 months ago and have had a number of consecutive problems. I think I've been able to fix them all (see below) and am writing this in the hopes it will help save other buyers trouble and headache. I wouldn't recommend this laptop given the problems I had and the time I spent on it. Without the fixes the laptop was unusable. However, with my last fix the laptop actually seems to run well (so not a one star) but I don't think the average user will know enough to go through the fixes needed. There's also still the bad placement of the very sensitive power button on the side of the laptop that is very easy to hit accidentally whenever I shift or adjust the position of the laptop. Problems: 1. Audio. Speakers stopped working properly. The sound would start initially then fade or crackle out. Figured out that if you disabled the Realtek Audio driver and just used the generic Intel HD audio driver sound would work. Problem was with every update (not sure if windows update or if there was an auto update for drivers generally or an auto update for the Realtek driver) it would reinstall and/or reset the Realtek audio driver and I'd have audio problems again. Permanent solution - reinstall clean windows 10 - see below. 2. Computer runs very slow sometimes/seems to lock up/drive continually spins. This was very inconsistent - at times the computer would run great and other times it was just unusable. The laptop would just lock up and nothing would respond while the drive spun nonstop. After a while it would finally "free up". This seems to be the result of incompatible software and bloatware loaded by Dell onto the laptop. Solution is a clean install of Windows 10. Do not "reinstall" or "reset" from within Windows system menu - it won't get rid of the bloatware. - you don't need a product code to reinstall windows - it's apparently hard coded into the motherboard (the one useful thing Dell told me) - problems creating bootable USB - windows doesn't recognize many USB drives (it thinks they're hard drives). So use Rufus. Won't detail here - just google it but essentially you download windows 10 tool as ISO file to your laptop instead of to USB. Then Rufus will convert that ISO into bootable USB file. - Make sure you delete all partitions when it asks you so that it is a clean install and wipes everything old off the laptop. - Dell makes it (intentionally) confusing to boot from USB. I can't now remember the specifics but when you restart computer and hit F12? to go to change boot options it's a 2 step process and there are warning messages and it kind of scares you into thinking you shouldn't be changing the first step. It's not until after you dismiss the warning and change the first step do you see the ability to change the boot order to boot from USB. - Once you do boot from the USB Windows gives clear instructions. - This also cured the Realtek driver issue - that driver seems to work fine now. 3. Battery drains quick and fan keeps spinning/CPU running. I thought I'd fixed everything after the windows 10 clean install. But now my computer seemed to run super hot, the fan was always blowing and I noticed that at 62% battery I only had about 1 hour 20 mins of usage left. There's a function in Windows settings that lets you see what apps/processes are draining the battery over the last 24 hours. Turns out that WaveMaxx Audio Pro was consuming 25% of all power use and it wasn't even in use! It was all background use. (My 2 daughters have profiles on the laptop and so it was running 3 processes at the same time). I couldn't even uninstall it because it didn't show up as an installed program. Finally figured out that if you go to the task manager and go to the startup tab you can enable/disable programs that run at startup. Not sure why a program that doesn't even appear to be installed is running at startup but there it was. I disabled it there and it no longer appears as a running process. I think that's solved all the problems. Will update if I have any more, but I spent a lot of time figuring out how to fix these problems so I hope you don't have to.