Horrible sound quality while recording

I’ve got the latest Audacity installed on a 2 year old i5 laptop running Windows 10. While I’ve used Audacity on and off over the years, I haven’t recoded anything in ages. I recently tried recording my guitar with a dedicated USB-guitar cable. The audio is horrible. It acts as if it’s got a noise gate enabled, only hearing some of the loudest audio. Its so bad you can’t identify what is being played, only make out a note here and there. I tried recording from the laptop microphone as a test. While the microphone is better, it still seems to cut out some of the quiet spots. I found an older irig usb adapter that has the exact same issue. My best guess is it’s either an odd computer issue or an Audacity issue. I installed Audacity when I got this laptop but haven’t used it until now so there shouldn’t be anything weird about it. Any ideas what it could be? Is there a simple audio recorder program I can use to test?
Thanks!

Make sure Windows “enhancements” are turned OFF. They can foul-up the sound in all kinds of crazy ways…

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That completely fixed the issue. Thanks to you! No thanks to Microsoft.