New with Windows 10 seems to be the Notification Area. Now, I’ve seen a few notifications (in the Action Center). The problem is that I haven’t understood any of them (actively using computers for 30 years now), and once I click them they are gone. Is there any way to view these past user notifications so I can try and make some sense out of them?
Solution:
tldr; No there’s not.
The action center is the same as found on the Microsoft Phones running Windows 10 Mobile. These actions (notifications) are meant to be displayed to the user until they take action. There are two ways a user can interact with an action:
- Dismiss the notification (clears the action)
- Select the notification (respond to the action)
Once one of these interactions takes place, the notification and therefore the action is no longer displayed. No history is maintained of these notifications and cannot be retrieved. This is done on purpose as that history could (and most likely would) become very large.
If you are worried that the notification has system-wide consequences it could be worth looking into the System logs instead; here separate messages about system events are stored.
Update: It appears that some applications will additionally add events into the event viewer. This can be done by:
- Open Event Viewer
- Expand Applications and Services Logs
- Drill down to the app or service you are interested in, e.g. for Windows Defender you might go to:
Microsoft -> Windows -> Windows Defender -> Operationallog. - Review the log and look for the notification you were interested in.
This is NOT the notification history, but additional information provided by the application and as such, there’s no guarantee that the notification was logged. It also requires that a user knows which application whose notification they’re looking for.