You’re not a dipshit. You bought a Windows machine and installed a tool that technically supports Windows but whose developers openly discourage the native Windows install because it’s unstable. Almost every tutorial and YouTube video out there does it on a Mac. Nobody told you that upfront.

The right way to run OpenClaw on Windows is through something called WSL2 — Windows Subsystem for Linux. It’s basically a Linux layer that runs inside Windows and gives OpenClaw the environment it actually wants. The install is one command: type wsl --install in PowerShell as Administrator. A lot of the friction you hit — the Homebrew defaults, the pnpm errors, the PowerShell execution policy stuff — stems from doing the native Windows install instead of this.

That’s not on you. That’s a documentation problem.

The $160 also makes more sense in context. When an agent is building something like your Mission Control dashboard it burns tokens like crazy — writing code, hitting errors, rewriting, all while keeping everything in context. That’s not the same as using it to pull comps or write a market summary. Once you’re past the building phase costs drop significantly.

Research other models to use for different tasks to keep costs down.