Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrlk | Hacker News Reader

I've never found any compelling reason to set up Windows 11 (or 10) with an online account. Things like this just reinforce my decision to stick with a local account.

View on HN

The only one I ever found was that it made new installations of Windows free with a digital licence associated with your account. I don't know if this is still true of Windows 11.

I ended up making an MS account to store the license info but I just use it once per install to log in/activate then create a "real" local account. Hopefully this still works.

It forced me this last time I set up windows 11

Hit Shift + F10 at the Windows 11 setup screen to open a command prompt, then enter `oobe\bypassnro`. After this, skip connecting to a network and this will allow you to create a local account.

It's extremely obnoxious that they've made it this difficult.

didn't work for me on 24H2 /shrug

it worked for me on win11pro 24h2 just a few days ago; maybe you had a lan cable connected?

This conversation is surreal.

for you it was probably because it's pro... others have stated pro and above still let you go without an MS account.

There are several bypasses.

Don't connect to the internet -> Shift + F10 to bring up CLI -> OOBE\bypassnro

The out-of-box experience will restart, and you will have a button to set up with a local account.

You can also (or at least could, it's been a bit since I've tried this method) use a banned e-mail account when it asks for your Microsoft account.

Additionally burning the ISO to Thumb drive with Rufus [1] gives an option to disable Microsoft Accounts and hardware validation upon installation.

[1] - https://rufus.ie/en/

OOBE\bypassnro still works. I've been setting up a bunch of new machines recently (last was yesterday) that I've had to connect to a local domain, so this made it so much easier to just make a local account then domain join the machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com