Business Notebooks

Recently acquired this notebook. So far everything has been going smoothly. Loaded a clean Windows 11 Pro install. Let Windows Update grab the initial set of drivers and then installed HP Support Assistant and let it grab/update the rest. No leftover devices in device manager and everything seems to behave.

Save for a few middling issues/gripes I have that I'm hoping I can get some help on:

1) Currently there's no battery life estimate. I get the battery percentage but no '<x> hours, <y> minutes remaining' estimate. I've researched this a bit and the only recommendations I have seen are a few Windows registry options and none of those have helped.

2) I have tried to disable some of the remote management settings in the BIOS like CIRA and Intel's AMT as an example. As a home user, these don't serve me much use and I was hoping disabling some of these would help decrease the seemingly slow POST process. However when doing so, it caused a number of huge issues including a glacially slow Windows boot (the spinning circle screen takes a solid few minutes on a good Samsung NvME SSD) and when finally booted, the sound card was completely inop. Had to back out and reset the BIOS to defaults to get things back to a stable config. I'll have to check again what I had disabled at the time but I'm 100% positive I never touched stuff I would think would impact these like built in device toggles and I believe I left the Sure Start BIOS verification defaults enabled. Any idea what may have happened here?

Appreciate any info or help you can provide. Thanks!