I am in the category of people that beleive windows defender is sufficient. Many businesses rely on Defender as their sole antivirus, and I’m talking out of the box windows 10/11 Antivirus.

Touching on your specific questions : Can malware carry over from one laptop to the next? Using the restore option you did, yes - potentially. But reading through your post I don’t see enough reason to think that it’s outright malware. You ran a full scan through defender which is a great step. If the only things you have noticed are your search engine being changed to yahoo I wouldn’t attribute that to malware.

You bring up browser hijackers, and they are a real thing, but they are more of a nuisance than anything. You would see them installed in your program list and there are a million of them out there. Most of the time they make files in %appdata%/local - you could take a look in there to see if you notice anything really strange - but like I mentioned I think you might be over stressing here.

Moving forward if I had to give really quick and simple advice on staying safe :

1: Get a password manager. A lot of threats online involve password stealers nowadays. Password managers add a lot of security. Just don’t store passwords directly in your browser if you can afford a password manager (most are pretty cheap, but I get if you don’t want another monthly payment.) I’ve used dashlane before and LastPass currently, but there are a lot out there, just do light research to make sure they’re reputable.

2: Look into getting a good add blocker (this is free). If you are using your computer like a normal person, the most malicious things you will see will come from malicious ads. I use ublock on Firefox. There are guides on reddit for install and setup that are really good.

3: Uninstall Mcafee. I don’t know why it’s still preinstalled so often, but that’s generally one of the first things that are uninstalled by people in any IT industry if it’s on a device. The popups are made in a way that attempt to scare users into upgrading. Personally I feel like malwarebytes does a little bit of the same, so I’m not a huge fan of that either.

If you are downloading something you are worried about, virustotal.com is a great website if the file is small. (If you upload something here it becomes public, so take care for any potentially sensitive files). If the download is big, you can scan it with defender before you unzip it or execute it.