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.
I just set up a Windows 11 PC this week for testing (did it through a USB installer upgrading from Windows 10 Pro) and I was able to use the bypass OOBE/BYPASSNRO in command prompt and was able to create using a local account. I kept it offline without connecting to the internet during setup into getting to the desktop. This was using the latest Windows ISO on Microsoft’s website.
Safe to say, I think it still is doable even going the reset method in Windows. Just keep it offline during initial setup.