My computer has accumulated some cruft that’s making it hard to manage, and resetting the PC seems like the most straightforward way to deal with it. I already have all my important files saved elsewhere. I also wanted to see if I could kill two birds with one stone and rid myself of the dependence on an MS account. I’ve seen there’s some terminal stuff you can do when installing Windows fresh that bypasses the mandatory account creation, but does that still work when resetting? Especially when resetting from the cloud?
And because someone is going to say “Just use Linux”, believe me, I’d love to, but the user experience sucks for literally anyone who isn’t a software developer and the accessibility has actually gotten worse over the 15 years I’ve tried to use it.
phanto@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Reset, once it’s done downloading (if you go cloud), pull your network cable. When it gets to “let’s get you online” hit shift f-10 which pulls up the terminal window. Type oobe\bypassnro and hit enter. Stay offline, and get back to the same spot in the install process but this time you’ll have a “I don’t have internet” link as an option. It’ll protest, but you can then move forward with a local account. I literally did it yesterday.
Once you have a local account built, Windows will give you “sign in” alerts in settings and in security.
Just for the record, I use Linux. I do however work in a Windows shop and understand that “just use Linux” isn’t at all helpful when someone asks a Windows question.
kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
BypassNRO was removed from system files in 25H2 last year, unless you happened to be served an old ISO this won’t work anymore.
This is what I’ve been using since:
You can also use Rufus to make a setup drive which preconfigures the local account. This method and the one I use are described in this article.
PS: It still works if you copy the BypassNRO.cmd file from an old system to a new one when you’re in OOBE mode (Shift+F10) during setup. It’s just a powershell command that sets a registery key and reboots.
phanto@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Huh, that’s weird that I’ve been able to use the bypass NRO trick pretty consistently at work and at home… I should have mentioned the Rufus thing too, but he was doing this as a reset, not as a new install, so I didn’t.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is odd because just yesterday I used it to reluctantly install Win11 as a quarantined VM for my lovely but stubbornly insistent wife. It was a tiny11 iso, though, so maybe it gets added back during image creation?
umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
and they say linux is the complicated one
phanto@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Hehe… Try installing VMware Player or Genshin Impact in Fedora! (Those are my two most recent headaches.) Any OS can be a pain, it just seems like Linux is getting friendlier every year and Microsoft becomes more overtly the enemy.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And if you still get prompted for an MS account, hit shift+F10 again and run
start ms-cxh:localonlyearly_riser@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Thanks, have an upvote :)
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I want to reiterate the importance of the “pull the network cable” part. If you fail to unplug the cable before the setup wizard detects that there is the possibility of a network connection, on some systems it will actually prevent you from making a local account altogether, as it will force you to connect to a network which will skip the shift-f10 step.
We had this issue setting up demo models on laptops for awhile, if you didn’t disable the wifi adapter before it saw there was networks available(even if they were password protected) it would require a second factory reset to even get to the point where it would let you setup a local account.