notification

A few times a day (or hour) the notification icon turn white and hovering over the Notification icon will cause a small message "New notifications". Yet, when you click on the icon there are no messages? Is anyone else seeing this?

My computer doesn't give me an option to install windows 10. I'm using Windows 8.1 on a HP laptop, and reserved my copy at the start of the month. My friend told me they got theirs by looking at the Windows update center, so I went there. I had a few updates to install, so I did then (including...