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.

  • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    16 hours ago

    I always disable the card in the BIOS before I do anything that requires it to be disconnected. In this case I had both an Ethernet adapter and WiFi radio. Both were disabled and I’m currently typing from my newly decrappified and locally managed system.

    Here are my exact steps:

    1. go to “reset this PC”
    2. select the cloud install
    3. select the option to erase everything
    4. wait for the installer to download. The machine will restart. In my case my Windows bootloader is broken and it tries to boot using GRUB. I haven’t figured out how to fix it including “fix boot” or whatever the recovery option is, but that’s neither here nor there. I rebooted from GRUB, went into the BIOS, and disabled all networking hardware (Ethernet and WiFi).
    5. Rebooted again (I have to manually go into the one time boot menu every time) and go into Windows. Once it gets to the “Let’s get you connected” screen, I pressed shift+F10, then entered oobe\bypassnro.
    6. The computer immediately rebooted and started the install wizard again (asking about keyboard layouts and such).
    7. On the “Let’s get you connected” screen, there was now a tiny unhighlighted option I don't have internet. I clicked it and it let me create a local account.