There is such a thing... I do believe it's called A FIREWALL.
You can block individual connections if you have the details of what is connecting to where.
And, you only get infected with crap if you let crap onto your system.

One: the battery will _always_ lose some in storage
Two: it's a laptop, not a desktop. There's going to be some power draw... if you want full 0% draw, pull the battery.
Three: "hibernate" stores the RAM data to disc
Four: Full shutdown will shut it down totally (where it runs the whole BIOS self-test before even trying to boot), the battery will still self-discharge regardless.

Also, setting a laptop to spin-down and start-up a spinning harddrive is a ton of wear-and-tear on it (each of those cycles wears down the bearing on the motor... the platter rides on an air-bearing... during the startup and shutdown it's wearing that bearing), and the cycling heats and cools the board which can weaken the solder joints.

Dig into where stuff is being sent over your IP connection... that stuff can be blocked at your firewall (route it to loopback, 127.0.0.1)... it won't make it to MS.

*hugs his Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC computers*
You're more or less right...
Everything is going to be feeding the LLM-AIs "so they can be more intelligent".
I wish Win7 had been the last big version... if they'd built _optional_ new versions based on that instead of the pseudo-Mac-like interface Win11 has, it'd be okay.

You do know there are ways to disable the majority of that stuff, and the rest can be blocked at the firewall.
Windows (some version), on a handheld, is dependent on having the right drivers and all that jazz for the device, and whoever made those drivers not deciding to end support (or even issue an update that disables those drivers)... it'd have to be a version of Windows tuned for the device in question... kinda like the UMPC thing (wish that'd caught on a lot more).

So... *Nix is the answer?
Okay... do a clean install (full format, bare metal style... nuke and pave as geeks call it)... with no editing configs or going into terminal or setting up VMs, what games or Windows-only stuff work?
Sure, *Nix has stuff *mostly* equivalent that'll mostly do stuff, but that document you spent a lot of formatting on in MS Office probably won't open right in LibreOffice... now you get to reformat the entire thing, and hope you don't lose anything.

*Nix user: "But you can run the game (or whatever) in a Windows VM"
Reality: You set up a VM, install Windows on it, install the game on it, deal with lots of performance hits... and the game kinda works.

Not to mention if you have documents formatted in Office (.docx), it's a roll of the dice whether they'll open 100% properly in LibreOffice or whatever the latest thing is.
*Nix is _not_ a drop-in replacement for Windows... it would have to 100% interpret Windows programs and Office documents and everything without spending several hours in Terminal just to hopefully edit the config file for LibreOffice perfectly to handle .docx files.

But... that's just my opinion as a computer geek since before the IBM Aptiva E2N-2153 was a new machine.

Linux is the answer to "what OS should I use to avoid M$ 11"... except it's not the case for SUSE Enterprise now (and, I'm sure all the rest of the distros are working to add it in)... just give them time.
I've been saying that the LLM-AI crap will find it's way into all OSes (or, should it be OSs?), regardless whether it's *Nix, Mac or Win.
I'm sticking with Win10 Enterprise IoT LTSC, and even once that's old, I'll probably still run it... sure, no 'security updates', I'll just not go to websites or click ads that would install questionable crap, and I'll keep HiJackThis and Spybot handy for random checks.

'Install *Nix, configure it your way, install a VM program, install Windows in the VM program, install MS Office in VM'... so, what did you gain.

If LibreOffice opened .docx files correctly, and other stuff that needs Windows worked in *Nix 100%, more people would move to it.

Or... maybe just run a pre-cloudized version of Office (I run Office 2016)... never needed M$ support for anything. I also run Win10 Enterprise IoT LTSC, and I'm not moving to a newer version until they get rid of the Mac-like interface.
I save my stuff to Google Drive, which stores local copies on both Windows computers in my apartment, and on ma's laptop (off-site).

I don't see a need to pay a subscription fee to be able to run Office Word, after buying the license to run it, and needing a good internet to do anything... I can unplug my modem, block Office at the firewall, and it'll work fine.

Burning more coal assumes there are coal plants still standing where they are needed.

Building in some industrial capacity assumes there's a factory left to build the widget.

We added 60GW not because it sounded fun... the climbing numbers of EVs and LLM-AI datacenters and increasing number of electronic devices in a household require more power. Solar could maybe work if we just cover all the Southern states _entirely_ in solar panels.
Remember, we can't burn the 460 billion short tons of coal under our feet because of the smoke and pollutants. Same with the oil we have on US soil... 373 million (recoverable) barrels.
Even going totally green, we won't see the results for a century or two... smog isn't going to just go away the day the last car is shredded (especially at the rate trees are being mowed down to make way for genetically modified crops).

If the designers have half a friggin' brain, that would be built into it... some sort of traffic management (datacenter 1 is busy, redirect to datacenter 2)... kinda like BOINC back in the day.

The datacenter doesn't "choose to go idle", there's no tasks waiting to be crunched, so it just sits idle waiting for something to come in... network/system management _should_ handle the distribution of tasks between all the datacenters... "the datacenter in New Delhi isn't busy, so we'll aim some traffic it's way" (of course, that's only _if_ they set everything up right... one rack-mount server shouldn't be the only one stuck crunching Pi to 20 gajillion decimals for ten hours... send half the task to one, and the other half to another machine, and it takes half the time.

"What's to stop people from submitting the same thing to various AI's": you know as well as I that all this "AI" nonsense will be monetized in short order... you might be able to submit a query for free, but it'll get processed when some server in the football field goes idle, and it'll email you the result. You can get a faster result... just pick from one of 5 dozen tiers of paid subscriptions... the more you paid, the faster the LLM-AI will respond.

The 'bubble' won't totally burst... even if it's proven not worth the hassle, one of the "AI" (we're decades away from Skynet) companies will keep tinkering and eventually get it to where the general public expects it to be.
The power demand won't go away... between the LLM-AI datacenters and EVs and the increasing reliance on computerizing everything (down to the fridge and the simple toaster on the kitchen counter), even with entire states covered by solar panels we're still going to need a ton more nuclear plants.

I'd rather just read the article, drive my car (if I had one), and code that project myself without relying on OpenAI or whatever.
Right now, LLM-AIs are just a neat thing built out of Legos... maybe someday it'll be truly useful for something, but that's a ways off in the future.

"But... we need LLM-AI to summarize every news article and email we want to read!"
The reality is that the LLM-AI we have now will be used to replace as many human-jobs as possible... down to even using LLM-AI powered factory robots with machine vision (why does BK need a human to flip the burgers... a robot can do it, too). Once it's properly trained, the company won't need you to spend a week coding the new Windows update... the LLM-AI will do it in 10 minutes.

Okay... let's just say one LLM-AI datacenter needs 5GW... okay, solar is like 200W per panel in ideal conditions... where are you going to put 25 million solar panels? What if it's cloudy? Those datacenters gotta have their power... so, you gotta have something ready to switch over to at a moments notice. Maybe a coal plant? We've got like 470 billion short tons just sitting there... why not use it for something? Either a lot of power or a helluva grill-out!
People gotta have their AI slop... they won't stand for a gap in the AI-generated shorts on Facebook!

It doesn't really matter how "efficient" you make the LLM-AI... the computer still draws power, just draws more when the LLM is doing something.
And, something like having the computer go into standby right away when it's not being used is the worst thing you can do for a computer... the heat stress from cycling power (warm up from being on, cool down while in standby) breaks solder joints... and spinning drives up and down a lot wears out the bearing.