I had similar issues with a home-rolled desktop(nothing ridiculous! intel CPU, amd GPU, adaptec raid card, stack of ram. No old or weird hardware) and eventually just gave up and sold the entire lot. The last straw for me, after many update issues, is when it decided to update on its own in the middle of the night and then refuse to boot due to some date/time mismatch error killing the windows activation so much it wouldn't even start up beyond the error message. I googled it, and it ended up being faster to reinstall than fix since i had an install USB on hand.(it was some huge mess of "mount the boot drive on another system and then...")

I just use my(pre-current design/mk1 retina) macbook pro with the same monitor at my desk now

That’s not normal behavior (random sounds, slow startup and wake). You should check the event viewer for errors, something is wrong with your system. I’ve had problems like that in the past with bad drivers. Once the driver was upgraded the problems went away.

Yeah, you can turn off that "People" tab. Just right click.

In my experience it comes back after every major update. I've installed StartIsBack[1] to get rid of this nonsense for good but it's a pretty awful out-of-box experience.

[1] http://www.startisback.com/

It's never come back for me. Turned it off once when it first came out. I wonder what the difference in our setups is? Never had to resort to third-party programs either.

Chromebook is nice here.