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Comment by Brett_Riverboat | Hacker News Reader

For those who care at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10

CMD will open

Type (no quotes) “net user Prefferedusername /add” (replacing Prefferedusername with the user name you wish to use) and press enter.

Next type “net localgroup administrators Prefferedusername /add” and press enter.

Next type “net user Prefferedusername /active:yes” and press enter.

Next type “net user Prefferedusername /expires:never” and press enter.

Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.

Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.

Next type "regedit" and press enter.

This opens registry editor, navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE"

Delete "DefaultAccountAction", "DefaultAccountSAMName", and "DefaultAccountSID"

Right click on "LaunchUserOOBE" and rename it to "SkipMachineOOBE" and make sure the value is set to "1".

Close registry editor and type "shutdown /r /t 0"

View on HN

I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here. I could see screenshots maybe being slightly helpful, but to having this sort of thing as a video feels like an extreme inconvenience; I'd much rather see all of it at once and be able to visually scan (or even better, ctrl+f) to find specific parts over having to scrub around if I wanted to go back to a previous part or skip ahead. My eyes also don't require any sort of manual timing to pause on something I want to copy.

Youtube creators want to cover this, youtube is their chosen path, so video it is.

Not so much about the best way to communicate as much as the creators see it as their best option, for them.

I've seen a lot of tutorials that really just seem to be infotainment / social media news. Often forgetting critical steps and describing why you do a thing incorrectly. It's frustrating.

Exactly this. If I have 100,000 followers on YT for my software related content, why wouldn't I use that platform to post my content? Some people are also visual more visual learners and while straight text is helpful, having a trusted source going screen by screen/prompt by prompt and comparing to their machine is helpful.

So it's both content and communication preferences. HN is a self-selecting group of a certain type, but not everyone on the planet thinks like the average HN dude

Just yesterday there was a post to one of Geerling's pages where he posts the transcript to a video he's made. He could have just made a text blog and not spent the extra effort of making a video, but that's not what he does. Instead, he went the extra step to make the content available in text only. He could have just as easily left it as video only. (yes yes, creating a text only transcript of video in today's world is trivial, but an extra step nonetheless as it still needs to be added to his CMS to make the webpage)

Videos get higher rankings in Google's search. Remember those?

Definitely says something about your age though complaining about video versions of anything. Kids today don't even know what Google's search page looks like. They search in YouTube, TikTok type apps first. Since the location bar has also become the search bar while theGoogs pays browsers to be the default search, lots of people are not even aware they are doing a google search.

Also, some people will try things that are technically above their abilities normally. Having a video typing the commands in can be easier for them to replicate as it'll look just like the video. Text only from some webpage won't have those visual clues.

I much prefer text for this stuff too, but at least I can understand why something else is preferred by someone not me. I might be elder, but I'm not obstinate

Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing". I'm not claiming that there can't possibly be a reason that videos might work better for some people, but I don't think you've made a particularly strong case that you understand their mindset rather than judging them under the guise of claiming that I was the one doing that.

No, you're old man yells at clouds with the entire comment. Someone likes something you don't prefer, and want to share that with the internet. That's great, but you have to know that someone will call you out on it.

Some people like blue, some people like red. Some people like audiobooks, some prefer reading actual books. Some people like to go to movie theaters, some prefer to wait for the movie to watch at home. Some people like cilantro.

The internet is a big place. There's room for multiple ways of skinning the cat without preventing any of the other ways.

> Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing".

Not an argument. It's an explanation. Stop with the antagonism.

This was a good comment until it suddenly became bizarrely insulting in the last paragraph.

I don't feel I was insulting at all. If you feel obstinate is an insulting word I really don't know how to respond as anything else will probably feel as an attack on you now. I guess I could have said non-empathetic, but we're not talking about feelings so much as valid reasons someone prefers A over B.

Video format is objectively lower bandwidth (information-density-wise) than text regardless of age.

That assumes that how young people use the internet is inherently better than how we use it.

I can get the same information only without the ads and parasocial relationships with content creators. Not making anyone money!

I share your bias, but something to consider is the prevalence of smart phone usage these days, and the fact that reading text on a smart phone can be as awful as trying to watch a video on a desktop when all you want is a quick text summary.

I've always hated the trend of moving towards video as well. But if my desktop was currently in the process of installing the operating system, leaving me without a web browser, and all I have is my phone as a secondary device ... I might actually prefer watching a quick video over trying to read text on a tiny screen and having to pinch zoom and horizontal scroll. Of course this depends a lot on how the text is presented, but in general I think video is easier to absorb on a phone and text is easier to skim / read / zoom / copy-paste on a desktop.

Reading a brief article on a smartphone is far less tedious than having to squint at details in a miniscule video.

If you can't read normal text on a phone screen, consider corrective lenses.

it's easier to monetize a video, and if this information is going to have value and be presented for free there has to be someone giving someone money somewhere.

Suggesting someone can make money off of their efforts that doesn't cost the viewer/reader anything directly is one thing, but to suggest nobody anywhere ever posts anything to the internet without the expectation of monetizing it is just totally ignoring how the internet was started.

no one is talking about the entire internet starting from 1976, we're talking about the tech tips space in 2025 where a vanishingly small percentage of people are acting in a non-monetizable way.

Maybe we can get somebody willing to do a "in a weekend" project scraping websites to just to make that content available on a free website. of course, nobody could afford the hosting fees once all of the bots start scraping your site that you built by scraping other sites.

> I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here

For the creator: videos can be monetized trivially

For the search: YouTube results are often highlighted top of the page on Google search results.

My guess is some of the better videos will post the text in the description and some folks are very visual and need to be able to reference an image or video.

But that aside I appreciate the compliment (or at least I'm going to take it as a compliment).

It's telling that most of the responses to this question center around why the YouTube video creator would want to make a video instead of a simple text description, not what the OP asked: why the user would want to intake the information by way of video.

Says a lot about what is broken, incentive-wise, about the modern Internet.

I think it says more about most people not wanting to bother to read.

Modern social media has only succeeded by moving away from text, and meeting the masses where they already are. They mostly don't want to read.

Definitely there has been a shift towards video content.

But I think there is a discoverability dynamic at play as well. Finding a blog post that isn’t garbage can be harder than finding a decent video on any given topic. This is clearly a feedback loop towards video but I think partly this is because up until now you couldn’t just create a spam video channel with the same ease that you could a spam blog.

Not just social media, at work you're lucky if anyone reads the docs, and blessed if you find someone writing docs. To say nothing about how the substitute for those is looping zoom meetings.

How so? People like to learn in various ways, some people like to read, other people like to inspect someone else doing it in real time.

I don't see an issue with there being multiple ways to learn how to do something, whether it be textual, images or video.

For this type of thing having a video running in the background while I punch in the commands makes sense, I can perform the actions at the same time the video does.

I think non-technical people, who may have literally never seen a commandline, like seeing someone walk through it (and probably explain context along the way). Helps ensure them they are doing the correct things.

I've seen probably too many terminals, but a video that actually demonstrates things (when to press the keys, for how long, what's the expected response from the installer, and so on, and so on) seems super helpful and easy to follow! (Even if it's worse in many regards, like terseness, accessibility for blind people, and so on.)

Agreed. Also people tend to add a lot of context when they're talking through a process. That often gets left out when writing.

I've written docs at work intended for non (or less) technical people and it's a pain in the ass to try and get screenshots of expected inputs/outputs, try to predict every question or misunderstanding and make the writing clear. There has been more than a few times I wished I could just record a video.

> I guess I'm out and out of touch

I don't know why this is being put in this "I guess I'm old" bucket. Its just another form of content and a different way of following something. Perhaps if they put the text commands in the video description you would get the best of both worlds.

I like both, but following along watching someone else is helpful. YouTube tutorials on how to do things are extremely helpful.

If you find the video an inconvenience, just don't use it.

you could do screenshots, but my preference would be a video with the text instructions as the description, with timestamp links.

text with images is a pain to scroll, and in video form you have one more channel of info - sound.

the visuals are there to tell you where it is you find the different things, or so you dont go hunting for a button that doesnt actually exist on a gui, but also so you can match the confirmation, and get an idea on if its running at about the right speed

> I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here.

Because a bucketload of people only interact with the Internet using a device with a tiny-ass screen and super-shitty keyboard.

So, what you are actually asking is "Why the hell are people using phones to look this shit up instead of a laptop?"

Which, to be fair, is a valid question.

TextSniper on Mac and PowerToys OCR on Windows have eased my frustration with rasterized text in 'engagement'-obssessed videos that should have been blog posts.

As a beginner doing tech things I quite like youtube video. There are various problems with text. It'll say just type this into that but sometimes you don't know what to click to get 'that' to open. Then you find the instructions don't work because they've either skipped over something they think is obvious, or the software version has changed since they wrote it or their setup is different from yours.

At least with a recent video you can see what they click, it's probably up to date and you see all the stuff they do and you can see if it actually works.

I was trying to install jupyter notebook a few months ago and all the how tos failed because macos had updated some nonsense. At least with youtube you can try to find a recent one where they mention that.

> I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here

It is because "modern" search engines will retrieve only links to SEO spam. The only thing that, somehow, works (50% of the time) is youtube search.

Enshitification.

Its not as helpful, but youtube will give far better discoverability. Facebook isn't mostly the right audience, and everyone else is fractured up among many other social media companies. Not even reddit is a great place anymore for this sort of thing because so many older users and tech enthusiasts have abandoned it.

I'm coming here from a follow up post. I would find it difficult to follow a YouTube version of these instructions, but I might resort to searching for it because it is much easier to find this kind of information on YouTube than through a search engine, whose results are hopelessly polluted by LLM spam that has the deficiencies of often being just subtley wrong enough as to void it's usefulness, misrepresenting chronology in a way that makes it difficult to identify the up-to-date methods, and answering questions that are popular and easy to answer over ones that are difficult or unsolved, while failing to identify the difficult problem or its sticking point.

Take it down before Windows is ruined for everyone! Show not the devil's commands! All hail our Lord and Savior, constant surveillance without consent!

There's that Microsoft UX we know and love!

People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux. But they don't similarly complain about these ultra obscure, ugly commands. When Microsoft necessitates commands, somehow it's different.

You're not supposed to do this, this is to get around a restriction on installing Windows 11 on certain hardware. If your computer is supported and you install it the way Microsoft wants you to, then you won't be typing any commands anywhere.

> You're not supposed to do this,

Clearly. You're not supposed to own your computer, you're supposed to be a docile loyal rentoid.

Generally curious, I don't see anything about hardware. Isn't this is about making a login that doesn't require you to login to MS's cloud. Also, what HW restriction does Microsoft want? Why do they care?

Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, that's the actual reason a massive number of PCs can't update to it. There's apparently some way you can hack around that and install it. I assumed that's what these videos were about. But from the reddit post it looks like it's talking about both that and the account login issue which I wasn't familiar with.

> including how to install Windows 11 without logging into a Microsoft account and how to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

Yes this is about a local login, it has nothing to do with hardware.

> If your computer is supported

That's not really the use-case for this. It's not possible anymore to use Windows with a local account (for a long time), the official UI only lets you login with a Microsoft Account. These commands are not used to install Windows on an unsupported PC, they're being used to create a local-only account.

I for one still got a Windows boot partition next to my Linux, but I refuse to create an account for it. The only way I can install Windows on my supported PC with a local account is by using these commands.

You used to be able to just press a small button. Then you had to disconnect the LAN cable and not connect a WLAN to create a local account. Then you had to open the Commandline and execute a single command. Now we're at the point where you have to execute multiple commands.

If they actually manage to make it impossible to use Windows local-only, that will truly be the nail in the coffin for me. Currently use Windows to play games which aren't supported on Linux, but this will turn into a hate_for_online_forcing > appreciation_for_kernel_level_anticheat_shitgames.

You didn't have to use to do this to your OS when Windows was still good.

It's only the absolute shitfest that Win 10/11 ended up being that you have to conjure 300 arcane powershell commands just to get the OS to resemble a productive environment.

I think every single Windows release has necessitated some registry hacks to bring back useful features from the previous version

Yes, but more and more every version.

Especially true since they ended the service pack model. Continuous updates and hostile feature pushing is absolute cancer.

Do people complain about that? Like, life long windows/mac users who aren't interested in linux I guess? I always thought people loved being able to do everything from the command line.

> People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux

They do? How else does one use Linux if not via CLI? You mean those kiddies that like GNOME/KDE? pfffft, they're not "using" Linux. They're just using Linux to run other apps no different than using a ChromeBook

hmmm, news to me.

i thought i used Linux all these years, but i guess i dont.

Unless you are somehow manually issuing syscalls, you aren't "using" Linux either. I guess you mostly use GNU/Linux.

... Or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.

Or GNU / Systemd / Linux

I learned bash and then needed to use powershell once later down the road; that was.. that was bad.

Not bad for me, was actually great for me because now I just main Linux; but powershell, while I get it... don't do that to people.

"Linux is too hard for people"

Modifying Windows is something I've been doing for decades. Yes it is infinitely easier than learning a new OS.

Doing a thing that you already know is definitely easier than learning a new thing that’s for sure.

To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff. I can see why google would be concerned about malicious versions of these videos being posted, and being difficult to differentiate quickly from ones with the legitimate instructions.

Or if those malicious videos were posted and reported, then I can see why a fairly dumb AI system would see the similar legitimate ones as the same thing. Probably a particularly bad scenario for automated moderation.

What you're describing applies to just about every programming tutorial out there.

Then maybe Microsoft should add a "Use local account" checkbox to the installation screen.

>To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff

Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this?

In the early 2000s a newbie to our forums got computer advice to do something nasty to their BIOS. Months later they came back incandescent with anger. It happens.

And? Is your answer to “some people gave malicious advice on the internet” _really_ to outlaw giving _any_ advice on the internet?

No?

The poster upthread asserted it doesn't happen; I'm saying it does. I didn't propose a solution, and your proposal is clearly not acceptable.

I had a friend that would allow her kids to watch YT videos. One day they were watching a video in my backseat as we were driving where I could hear the audio. The person was trying to tell the kids how to get free stuff for some game or other. The instructions provided had my jaw in my lap. This was years ago so I don't remember the exact details, but it was straight up instructions for installing malware.

What's your point? It's surely not that giving instructions should be banned because it's possible to give malicious instructions, is it?

The point is that it wasn't just possible, they flat out were giving malicious instructions. Not sure why there's resistance when we all know there's shit like this on YT. I'm not asking anyone to remove it or ban it or report it. I'm just retelling the story of the first time I heard something so blatant that my jaw dropped on this not being some random story from the internet. It was just shocking the first time I experienced it. There's nothing to be done other than try to inform others it happens, especially when it's someone/a parent that doesn't know what it means.

I believe you can convince people to hit Alt+F4 for the cheat menu in a video game and they will do it. Actually I think I told people that is how to votekick someone in BF1942 when they are being a dick (me). I believe you can tell people to delete system32 and they will do it. I believe you can tell people to do more damaging things and they will. I still think people should be able to say and do those things.

So you'd advocate for github to remove any install script that users wget + curl, and any documentation references that instruct users to wget + curl? That's much worse than a handful of limited commands in which you're modifying your own user account.

Google is here to protect Microsoft OS users? Where do we draw the line on what Google (owner of Youtube) is responsible for.

I'm guessing that they take down videos that give you instructions that install malicious scripts etc, if they're reported. I don't know for sure, but that seems likely to be against their rules. And I'd guess that most of those would target Windows. Obviously they're not responsible for it, but I'm guessing they don't allow it and would remove it if it's reported.

It is easier to understand what a command does, than to derive how it is called from first principles.

So setting up windows is just like what I studied for that redhat cert now.

And this actually makes sure that the folder in `C:\Users\<username>` matches your username and does not become `firstname000` like Microsoft does.

Do people actually do this instead of just switching to linux?

I thought Windows was the "user friendly" choice

I found an Italian website that offers this and other procedures. To automate the modification, it suggests pressing SHIFT+F10 and then using the built-in Windows curl command to download a simple cmd script: https://www.ilsoftware.it/focus/windows-11-con-account-local... The cmd file can be run with the no-oobe username option, allowing you to choose the name of the local user account to be created. I hope this is helpful.

Nice find.

Those sort of thing always make me nervous however because it's not easy for the average user to tell if its running any sort of malicious scripts in the process. This one seems to be safe and I'm going to give it a try to see what happens.

The article also suggests that

"reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1"

still works as well which would be even better because thats local and easier to verify its integrity. that being said I think these are both valid suggestions if they work and I'm going to give them a try.

Yes, before running anything, you need to analyze the source. Still, I trust it: it works well, and as the Italian website indicates, you just need to check the linked .cmd file via the URL shortening to see exactly what it does. This should be done before downloading it with curl and before executing it as a .cmd file. The no-oobe solution also has the advantage of allowing the bypass of the entire OOBE phase.

If this Hack is necessary to use Windows 11 without registering online, then there will never be a Windows 11 for me.

What is the singular goal of doing all that? Avoid online-only accounts?

I have a microsoft account. I made it for Windows Live to play Halo 2 for Windows Vista back in the day.

Except, then Microsoft adjusted their account infrastructure, and now it's also an Xbox Live account. Then it became also a Windows Messenger account. Then it was required to login to Visual Studio. Then it ate my perfectly working Mojang account. Now I need it to install stuff from the Windows store like the damn Windows debugger you use to analyze BSOD dump files

I do not want my computer preferences saved across machines. I want to set up each computer separately. I do not want cortana. I do not want to connect my local computer to my account.

I gain nothing by using my microsoft account to log in to my local computer.

The singular goal is that I just want to use my damn computer, to do local computer things.

Note: A Microsoft account isn’t required to download free apps from the Store, it works fully without extra prompts on a local account. (I like that it works this way, because it means you can install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows without even once opening Edge.)

Microsoft has also implemented a package manager since a few years ago, winget, so now you can

  winget install -e --id Mozilla.Firefox

Has Microsoft removed the option to disable Microsoft Accounts via the Group Policy Editor?

It's not available in Home editions.

Too complex.

Download .iso of LTSC version of Win. Make bootable install disk via Rufus and tick options to create local account during install. Install Win from created bootable device. Done.

Or use Rufus to create the install media, it will ask you what mods you want applied, after installing run win11 debloater, it will ask you what mods you want to apply. Then if you’re a sane person that just doesn’t want to learn to navigate your OS with every update, install openshell.

This is ridiculous! I'm still on Windows 10 Pro without a Microsoft Account. Back then I had to jump some hoops, but it wasn't that bad. Seems like they really doubled down with Windows 11.

> Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.

> Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.

Why do we have to delete them?

defaultUser0 is used by windows for the OOBE if you don't delete it along with the registry keys it will just boot back to the OOBE again. defaultUser0 gets removed by the OOBE after setup leaving your system vulnerable. The administrator account is a built in account that is disabled by default but won't be disabled if you completely bypass the OOBE or don't use the old local account setup which you no longer can do because of microsofts removal of the feature.

Why not use with Administrator enabled but with a password and at highest UAC setting so that you'd still get a modal?

LAN Manager legacy still hanging around after 40+(?) years

Good guide, thanks!

präferiert (dt.) is often pronounced praefferiert in my head, too, but it is always written with only one f, in german and in english.

Upvoting before it gets deleted /sarcasm

Or just install Fedora Kinoite and don't look back.

Windows will never succeed on the desktop if it relies on arcane CLI configuration...

What does this accomplish?

gets you a local account

It lets you use your computer without requiring a Microsoft account.

Not all heroes wear capes. You are a local hero

Hey thanks, I needed a little boost today. You have been my little ray of light in a sea of darkness.

A few typos were brought to my attention in my previous comment and as the time frame to edit it has passed I am replying with the required edits so that if anyone does want to attempt this they don't have to wonder what went wrong

I originally had “ net user Prefferedusername/active:yes” but there should have been no space before "net" and I should have put a space before the "/" after prefferedusername.

so the corrected instructions are below. (hopefully without typos this time)

at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10