Got an inexpensive knockoff Win10pro laptop [View all]

and, after being away from Windows for the past few years, only using Android devices, I'm starting the process of reacquainting with it (ugh).

Back in the day, I had all the resources and tools I needed at my fingertips, but there's been a reboot--more like a disk crash and fresh install, but that's another story--and so I'm starting from scratch.

After unboxing this machine, I've started exploring its guts--offline, of course--and there are enough red flags that make me wonder whether I should attempt a Recovery fresh install, or if that would just produce the same result. It's Win10pro 64bit, but there are no instructions on how to do a Recovery, or how I would activate Win. I can see that there are 2 partitions that seem to be assigned for recovery, but no idea of the contents therein, yet.

The unfortunate conflict I'm facing is whether a machine compromised by a Chinese dealer is worse than a machine compromised by a fresh install of Windows!

I guess my question is: which way to go, either brute force checking every single setting (any good current resource for the security/privacy implications of *every* setting?), or try to start from a fresh install, hopefully from the recovery partition?

This whole issue is why I've only been using Androids lately.