I'm not exactly a windows lover, but what are you people doing to your windows installs to get so many notifications? I get nothing at boot and the only notifications I get are from when windows defender blocks something and I need to add an exclusion.
What edition are you using? The home edition straight-up has pop-up ads[1] for random Xbox games, even on a clean install with all notification settings turned off.
One time I had the misfortune of installing the free version of Driver Booster. After that I think I spent the following 15 minutes closing ads and uninstalling all the bloated apps it installed alongside it.
I actually thought it was a virus until I discovered people actually pay money for it.
That was really common back in the day. AdAware and SpyBot Seek and Destroy came around just to remove the junk that was bundled with other software we forgot to uncheck. You didn’t always want 32 browser toolbars you never asked for.
It was never part of the OS until these last few years.
