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.
Don’t listen to people who suggest Ubuntu (or its downstreams) and the clownshow GNOME desktop environment.
If you have a spare USB lying around, try this live (without installing) to see if you like it and please do share your feedback: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/
Or even just your general gripes with Linux. I had the same outlook when I first tried Ubuntu but I didn’t realize it was just Ubuntu and GNOME being really crappy until I tried a different distro and DE.
Yeah, once you reach the setup screen and it asks you to connect to the internet, hit Shift + F10 (sometimes CTRL + Shift + F10) and it’ll pop open a CMD window in which you want to type in “oobe\bypassnro” and hit enter. PC should restart and when you reach the internet screen again, there should be an option that says “I don’t have internet”. Click that and make your local account.
If it doesn’t work, sometimes you have to do it twice. Just did it yesterday on a real machine and it worked first try, but every VM I’ve made had me do it twice.
It’s not ctrl+shift+f10, but you may need to hold the FN button if your F keys are also media keys. Try restarting the computer if it doesn’t work the first time. Does not work with S-Mode Windows
You can also try the command