No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut Microsoft is closing a popular loophole that allowed users to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. The change has appeared in recent Insider builds of Windows 11, indicating it is likely to be included in the production version soon. Microsoft refers to these loopholes as "known mechanisms" and is talking about …
Presumably one could just keep installing using a old iso pre-extra-enshittification, then upgrade Windows to the current release (as long as MS don't block downloading updates for machines without an MS account, which would cause issues for exterprise machines on domains)
I submitted to using a ms account during install, but I have a local admin and a local non-admin for actually using the machine. I don't know if that really buys me any extra privacy, but at least means it not clouding all my settings, files, etc.
This method may not actually work. It seems that updates stop working after certain releases of updates. After that point you're downloading the ISO and upgrading your installation to continue to get updates and the whole starts over again. At least that's been my experience.
Rufus has been a good tool to get past this problem for now. I'm somewhat apathetic about OS's but MS's shenanigans have made me finally bite the bullet and move to Linux everywhere I can. Not out of anger but just out of fatigue and the realization that I'm not as dependent on Windows as a lot of people are. Life is change.
Same for my 23H2 and ditto for my Win 10 22H2. Plus, both have updates permanently disabled and I have several backup methods employed. EOL-that's when the hardware croaks-hopefully several years from now. Meantime, Linux experiments will start with an older laptop. I'm still stuck using some windoze software for work and Linux studies to date indicate that some of it won't be easy if WINE or Crossover don't work.
I do something similar. I let Windows install with a Microsoft account (helps with activating a digital licence anyway) and then immediately create a local account and bin the Microsoft account. It only takes a few extra minutes to do that so it's not a big hassle. I don't use any of Microsoft's other products either so uninstall Office, OneDrive and most of the other crap that is just a link to an installer.
But .. Once you've created an account, there is somewhere for the machine to send the disc encryption keys to, even if you are not actively using the account.
I don't wan the overhead of disc encryption, nor do I want some remote party to have the ability to change keys for me, making it harder / impossible to recover my machine / its data at a point in the future.
I choose what options I want and what I don't, not some remote setup and management script.
I was thinking:
* create an e-mail address you never use. 10minutemail might do the trick
* install the OS with that e-mail account for the new MS account.
* create 2 users without an MS account, one called "god" and another that you use. Make "god" an admin
* REMOVE the original user and its registry info from the OS completely
I'll have to get a Piece Of Shit 11 machine in the next few months so I can run tax software. That's what I plan on doing when I set it up.
Pretty much what I do - the "e-mail address I never use" is a fictitious person living in a country i've never visited.
No phone number or gender details included.
In fact, last one i did, I used a Outlook.com address,when Windows was installed, I logged out of the online address, logged in as a local user and set the outlook address to be deleted.
It was deleted 30 days later.
Having been caught out by Bitlocker activation, we've taken to creating a generic account like <mycompany>-admin@outlook.com and then creating a local admin account once setup completes. This way the Bitlocker recovery keys are stored centrally and not in someone's personal MS account or the AAD account of the first user on that machine.
There's probably a better way but we couldn't think of one at the time.
"It's amazing how hard so many tech companies work to piss off their paying customers.
The MBA and bean counters have been working hard to milk everybody they can for as much as they can while giving them nowhere to run. It's the same thing the copyright trolls do. Ask for less than an attorney would cost to even look at a case to make it cheaper to admit defeat and pay the toll. What would it cost to switch a big company over from Winders machines and M$ Office products compared to just handing over more information and a credit card for auto-pay?
No only has the cost gone up, they want a stack of information for the account so they can monetize that.
Agreed. Microsquishy can do whatever they like to their steaming pile of crap OS - I run Debian 13 after switching from LMDE 6, and have absolutely no intention of ever reinstalling Windblows on this hardware! Screw their "Recall" spyware and US LEO using it to hoover private data, never mind nosy employers!
Same here, windows 10 is the last windows, retired now so don't have anything essential that needs Microsoft, no $work machine either where I made my retirement days before it would have been replaced by windows 11.
Have some windows 7 VM's for the really old stuff I like, win 10 can stay until it croaks i.e Firefox and Thunderbird no longer update then it is Linux all the way
I really think that really Microsoft lost the plot when they reversed their promise to users to make Windows 10 the last ever Windows edition which would become a rolling update release operating system. Very many Windows users would have probably been highly satisfied with that option.
My struggle is that I really should keep up to date with Windows for technical reasons. The last of six machines at home not running Linux is practically begging me. Sure, I could run a VM but that's not exactly the same as the true Eldritch Horror.
While that is true, it does make one wonder why MS are adamant that even those few hold-outs MUST succumb to having an MS account forced on them. Surely the numbers must be little more than a rounding error, so why not leave the possibility open for those people? It really doesn't make a lot of sense that they put resources into getting that last 0.001% of users into the MS account fold.
Because every person not on a Microsoft account is untapped revenue which they can't exploit. The whole purpose of Windows as an OS these days is:
1. For home/home office: provide a source of marketing revenue by showing ads and mining data, and be a gateway to providing M365 home/student plans
2. For business: be a gateway to providing M365 plans and Azure server hosting
3. For government: be a "good corporate citizen" and get lobbying power to alter laws and investigations etc.
Windows in in of itself is worth very little to MS any more, rather it's a gateway.
Like my grandma would yell in church and my stepdad would say down at the mill... BINGO, You Nailed It! The SIZE of a company and the level of their EVILNESS is in lockstep. The only thing that is going to save this world is LESS GREED and MORE EMPATHY. Sorry God, you had your chance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not necessarily. It's more akin to "as much as the market will bear" (but more like "as much as we can get away with"). There's not enough pushback for them to care. They could send out a sex toy and tell customers to suck on it in order to activate Windows, and there will be a lot of moaning (of both kinds), but people will still use Windows. Try to regulate what MS can get away with and there will be even more moaning.
As that kernel doesn't even operate by itself.
The year of the GNU/Linux desktop was in 1995 or so, as you could finally use recent computers in freedom again, alas that freedom was savagely ripped away with the inclusion of the first of many proprietary programs into Linux in 1996.
Point of order:
While I agree it would be much nicer if GNU/Linux (see? I remembered!) were totally open source, I, personally, having lived through the "no wifi driver" days, am willing to trade a few proprietary blobs for a system where all my key peripherals work as intended.
So, polluted as it may be by proprietary blobs, GNU/Linux (got it right again!) is much preferable in my mind to anything out of Redmond these days (and has been for many years).
Another nail in the lid for Win 11 as far as I'm concerned.
For home, I use a home built Desktop as my main and have a Laptop as a hardware backup just in case.
The laptop was never going to get Win 11, it barely ran Win 10! It's an old Intel Centrino (Core 2 Duo) and came with Win 7 originally, so that ages it a little. It now has Mint, and is fine for browsing etc. Just don't try to use it if not plugged in to the mains!
Desktop is dual booting with my old Win 10 install on the original and faster M.2 (from when I first built the system back in 2019), and Mint on a 2nd M.2 (not quite as fast, added later originally as a location for Steam games). Been using this set up for almost 2 years now, and have almost exclusively been using Mint for the last year, so Windows just not needed any more (for me).
Been doing a final clear out of the old Win 10 system, and plan to wipe and install a fresh copy of Linux to this faster M.2 and it will become the new primary OS. Perhaps a move to CachyOS this time, as half my time on this system is gaming, Mint works fine, but it needs a bit of tweaking (nothing difficult) to use newer drivers, firmware and Kernels. Whereas CachyOS covers this out of the box.
Obviously not everyone can escape Windows, typically down to specific software (Adobe, games with Kernel level anti-cheat etc), but I don't use any of these.
Unfortunately I'm stuck with Win 11 for my corporate provided $work laptop, so I can't escape completely!
My thought there, is that $corporate is paying you for all the time you spend futzing about with Windows. Took me a complete day to convince the (remote) IT guy that "upgrading" my machine (their wish, not mine) remotely wasn't gonna work. My on-site IT guy, who has been with us for donkey's, knows his stuff backwards and forwards,but has had his powers stripped by Corporate (Trust No One!) IT, was able to re-image in in the time it took for me to get coffee. But, I did have to drive in to work. I figured I'd give the System a chance, and when they couldn't deliver, I did what I should have done in the first place.
Of course, I then spent another day, ripping out all the crapware and configuring it the way I like it.
Retired now, so INLGAF. All power to the penguin!
Aside from the (alleged) usage of user data to train LLMs, and the gathering of telemetry to see how people are using windows to "improve it", there is a beneficial side effect for microsoft and their users...
By using a ms account on home and pro for "in-duh-viduals", key info about the machime can be backed up. Leading to faster issue resolution and a higher success rate for "duh-sers" and lower support costs for microsoft (and their partners) due the the faster resolution times.
While most readers of el-reg (me included) have never called microsoft (or OEMs and partner) support, many people do use it, and non-reg readers are the majority of windows users by a country mile, so, a net positive side effect for users! mic rosoft, partners and OEMs
JM2C
YMMV
One needs to call Microsoft Support? Around here, a gentleman with a rather thick South Asian accent calls every few weeks over a wretched telephone link, claiming to be from Microsoft and wanting to talk about my computer.
One problem, I haven't had a working Microsoft box around here since about 2006.
I object to the entire concept of external authentication for a system login; Microsoft doesn't get to decide if I'm allowed to login to my of God-damned computer or not.
WTF does one do if one is setting up a new device in a location without any Internet access? Such places exist, I assure you, and in a quantity many times that of places with Internet.
All I need Windows Setup to do is put the files on the disk and create the first login. I've got the rest handled from there; do kindly fuck off now.
It’s not only Microshaft buggering around …
From version 2.8.0 of Pfsense CE firewall (and their commercial offering) Netgate now requires you to be online to install the OS to your hardware of choice (offline installation media is no longer available)
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/install/netinstaller.html
As to how this might work (for example in a data centre environment) the semi official suggestion is to utilise the last available downloadable image v2.7.2 and then update it when online
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/197601/pfsense-2-8-0-full-iso-img
Enshitification is absolutely the correct word …
Yes most certainly that is a valid alternative but unfortunately (last time I looked) it did not have the equivalent of the must have add on Pfsense package pfBlockerNG. This is an essential for enhanced dns and ASN IP blocking. Without it my online life would be hell and Fiecebook, Goggle, Amazon et al would run riot.
We aim to lose by the smallest possible margin … b’stards all of them.
You can sort of simulate most of what pfBlockerNG does using a combination of alias table lookups and some hard work, but it's nice to have it available in package form.
I tried migrating away from PFSense recently but I have too much config and too many rules invested into it to try and move away cleanly so I gave up, lazy sod that I am.
The new online install of pfSense CE is a right pain. The last two version upgrades I did for my home pfSense firewall failed and I had to do a fresh install and restore a backup. The last failed upgrade was to go to 2.8.0, the online install failed too for some reason, luckily I keep the old versions of ISO's locally so went back to 2.7.2 and then moved away to a different firewall product. Netgate has become increasing hostile to CE users and especially around the online installer. Jimhas been implying the CE version costs them money to maintain and it's not worth the hassle. Their fix is to buy a license of Plus then you can get a offline installer. Been using pfSense for well over 15 years but not any more.
Their fix is to buy a license of Plus then you can get a offline installer
Only if you have a netgate appliance unfortunately. As a user of plus (my defence for paying is that it helps fund upstream FreeBSD development and I've been using PFSense for 12 years so they deserve something from me) I've not been presented with any automatic offline download links for it, and when I went hunting I found something suggesting that support will no longer provide ISO links - you have to go to the purchase history page for your netgate hardware product and the link will be there.
I object to the entire concept of external authentication for a system login; Microsoft doesn't get to decide if I'm allowed to login to my of God-damned computer or not.
The long and short it right there. It's MY computer and MY paid for software.
I have the same problem with another piece of software I own and I'm about to ditch for the free version, that comes with no strings attached.
Which is now the actual "Windows Pro" version. Also includes nice things like deduplication, which I first tried and used with Windows 8.0 with the dedup-components stolen from Server 2012 (non R2).
Or switch to some linux which can run the windows programs you need - not my solution, but works for many.
If that's the case then I'll not be installing Windows 11. I fail to see why anyone should have to sign into or create an account with a software provider just to install an OS or use their own damn hardware. Things were so much better in the 90s when devices were all unconnected and offline unless you wanted to connect to the internet. Yes we can all do so much more with tech, but it has made us all just numbers and data to vast swathes of companies who shouldn't know a thing about us all & who you wouldn't trust to runa bath.
Given that almost everyone will have an account to use their phone I struggle the the cries about how bad this is
I don't agree with it and the forced creation of accounts to do mundane things that have no need for a login but everywhere you go now, it is "normal" . That 99.999% just sign up without thinks shows just how few care.
Like the websites that increasingly froce a login or subscription if you block ads or reject cookies.
Have those downvoting actually read this?
I stated that I did not agree with it but that most people (and that will include most El Reg readers) will have one or more accounts/logins (whatever you want to call them) to use phones, Android or iOS.
Why is it that Microsoft doing this is deemed to be unacceptable but iOS and Android is not?
Heck even some Linux distributions are starting to edge in this direction.
I don't use iOS, is it even possible to use an Apple laptop without an Apple login? As earlier from someone indicate it was but that created limitations in how the device was used.
If you can what is the outcome in terms of the services that it can connect to?
99.9999% of the population that use tech simply don't care.
This post has been deleted by its author
Downgrade to W10 for me and use LegacyUpdate (thanks Liam)
I have tried Mint and even now removed my SkySports requirement, but I cannot get OneDrive to work reliably for 2 users on the same laptop. Kept on constantly asking for reauthentication, I could look at ownCloud or other, but i have somthing like 3 years or M365 licences to go as it is so cheap for a family to get 1TB of drive space each,.. and one is now at uni so needs it to just "work"
I had already resolved to go with Ubuntu and Apple for my computing needs, other than a few legacy systems running Win 10, 7, and XP, and a few VMs with Win 10. Win 11 was already banned, even from VMs. I will be moving away from legacy Windows and Windows in VMs ASAP..
Thanks for making the decision so easy, Sad Nad.
Well, I feel thoroughly justified in the deleting of my Windows 10 VM which I used solely for gaming, by the way all my games seem to run as well if not better under Linux. However I'm not sure if this change will make any difference to people ultimately, probably only to us privacy concious.
I would welcome a law which made software providers give us users a log of exactly what information they're collecting on us and a way to opt out, does anyone know how much business sensitive data has been collected in this way? There are laws about corporate espionage surely this would fall foul of no?
Create a burner MS account, install Windows, create a local user, remove dummy account, PROFIT!
(Ironically their push to passwordless accounts has *forced* me to use local accounts on a few of my headless PCs - Remote Desktop (which doesn't seem to have been updated since NT4) doesn't support logging in to remote machines with an authenticator or PIN, you have to use a password.)
Or Fedora, or Ubuntu or Bazzite...
Herein you see the problem. Yes more users will be attracted to Linux, yes this is An Goode Thynge™, however there will be an amount of splintering. And that's one of the simultaneous benefits and downsides of the *NIX ecosystem - we enjoy the diversity and choice of all these distros, but for the novice it can be intimidating and difficult to choose where to start. Unification is likely impossible, yet it may be necessary to gain more market share.
Very few people do a Windows install. Almost all Windows users buy a PC with it installed, or obtain it from work or a friend/family member who installed it for them. The people who install their own or install it for others are EXACTLY who they shouldn't want to turn off from Windows. Because that influences not only their usage, but the usage of the people they are installing for, and their recommendations to others - which carry weight if they are known among friends/colleagues as a technically knowledgeable person.
Sure losing some of them and those they install for may only knock a couple percentage points off Windows, but losing a big chunk of the technically knowledgeable Windows users means that when one of those average consumers who bought a PC with Windows preinstalled has problems, they are less likely to find someone willing to help. Those technically knowledgeable people they used to turn to for help will say "sorry, Microsoft became too toxic for me and I switched to Linux/Mac. I haven't touched Windows in over a year, you should ask someone else". When their problems aren't immediately solved by their technical family member / friend / neighbor like they used to be, they become more likely to be turned away from Windows in the future.
It is possible that this is the thin end of the wedge.
In the future Microsoft could force the account on those who have deleted the online account, or who have installed W11 before the online account was mandated.
Microsoft seems to be getting something out of forcing people to have an online account, else why would they bother closing the loop holes ?
I suspect it may be a way of ensuring that they can force a subscription upon people for their OS to be maintained.
> some ms account crap and a "reminder in 3 days"
Even on windows 10 I got numerous nags to use an online account until I found all the "off" options in various settings tabs, it felt like playing whack-a-mole at times. Even now on settings under my local account it has a "log in". WHY? I'm logged in locally already so $Soft can do one.
As for backups....thankfully a VM can be backed up as a single file!
Microsoft seems to be getting something out of forcing people to have an online account, else why would they bother closing the loop holes
You're assuming a grand strategy behind this, rather than a bloody minded engineering attitude of seeing ways around a "feature" they implemented as a bug that needs fixing. I doubt there's a mandate from up high telling engineers to close all the loopholes.
Because the biggest loophole is that nothing stops you from creating an anonymous junk outlook.com email just for the install. You fill in bogus personal information, and if it requires a phone number for verification (I'm not sure if it does or not, it is probably like the local account it is possible just not easy) just use one of those free temporary SMS sites where you can grab a number for a few minutes to receive the verification code. So even if they close every single loophole to where it isn't possible to install without a Microsoft account that's of no more use to them than giving in and letting me create the local user "DS999" at install time.
I suspect it may be a way of ensuring that they can force a subscription upon people for their OS to be maintained.
I'd suggest it's because they're angling towards their future model of all PCs being "streamed" from their datacentres over the internet, which would of course require an active Microsoft account, plus subscription. If they can get people used to using a MS account on their local PC now, plus online M365/office services, plus data all stored in OneDrive, it'll be easier later to convince them to buy a Microsoft Thin Client machine which just lets you access everything remotely for much cheaper than buying your own laptop or desktop and having to maintain it etc.
Of course, the world won't work the way MS want, but that's probably where they're at least aiming for right now.
I've just spent two hours trying to get a friend back into his Windows 11 laptop. It was setup with Windows 11 linked to his old hotmail address & is complaining that his PIN doesn't work. He made the simple mistake of saving his family photos to the pictures folder, which backed them up to one drive, filling it up & so now his account is locked. His dual factor email is 12 years out of date, his phone is a landline which can't receive texts & although he can see his emails he can't get passed the catch-22 that to add a new fall-back email or phone he has to use the email or phone that he doesn't have. I've sent him home to wait for a response from MS account recovery, but until then his expensive laptop is locked & encrypted. If successful I'll make sure he has the right authenticators & fallback methods so the bastards can't lock him out again.
If it was my machine I'd linux it, but he has stuff on the internal SSD & MS have locked it down "in the interests of security" so I don't think I can get his files back for him. He never asked for this so called "security", he never even wanted his family photos in the cloud, but he was sucked into their grip because save your stuff to "my pictures" or "my documents" is so ingrained in all windows applications.
Great business strategy, put your files here, we'll put them in our cloud, charge you to hold them & if you don't pay we'll lock down your account so you can't use your own computer.
Lately I've been wiping Windows loads for people who want Linux without even booting it up once. The first thing that goes into the machine is a Ventoy boot stick with several Linux installer images to choose from. The Acer computers/laptops (AMD processors and graphics) I've been getting for people work well.
I don't like to get involved with Windows 11 much, but now I'm going to outright refuse to deal with it. I've all but quit doing service because of Windows 11 as it is.
So yes, consider me one of those people who you can no longer call on to help with Windows.
My belief is that Microsoft are forcing Microsoft accounts because every person not on a Microsoft account is untapped revenue which they can't exploit. The whole purpose of Windows as an OS these days is:
1. For home/home office: provide a source of marketing revenue by showing ads and mining data, and be a gateway to providing M365 home/student plans
2. For business: be a gateway to providing M365 plans and Azure server hosting
3. For government: be a "good corporate citizen" and get lobbying power to alter laws and investigations etc.
Anyone using Windows who doesn't fit into one of those categories will be "costing" Microsoft revenue, and so they're going to do their best to force people into one of those categories and then sell them things/advertise at them once they're in there.
Obviously for numbers 2 and 3 local accounts (or more likely AD accounts) are perfectly fine, although MS would LOVE it if you'd use M365 Entra IDs for all of your AD users (so they can charge you a per-seat M365 subscription), but for #1 the only solution is to require a Microsoft Account. Once a machine has been produced by the OEM Microsoft has gotten whatever payment they're going to get for making Windows, so their only source of ongoing revenue (especially in the current market of depressed or flatlining PC sales growth) is M365 home and student subscriptions and advertising, so that's what they're aiming for.
""While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use," Microsoft said."
Oh, so it's all for our own good then, eh?
Enterprise customers still won't put up with the worst of this. So for those still forced to use Windows who have sufficient motivation, loopholes will remain.
The best (read: least shitty) option will likely remain Win 10 LTSC versions, including IoT Enterprise.
In the meantime ... if you can get away, why haven't you?
So, I'd been given a Win10 desktop PC that can't be "upgraded" to Win11. It's old, but still fairly nippy. Anyway, my wife’s laptop broke a while back, not worth trying to fix, so got her a new one. The old one had a SATA M.2 interface, new one an NVME M.2 interface, and the old SSD didn't work, not a combo slot. So I pulled both SSS, put them in USB enclosures and DD'd her old drive to the new. Everything went hunky dorey and the old SATA M.2 sat on a shelf "just in case". Anyway, long story short, I was messing with this old desktop PC and plugged in the USB SATA M.2 and tried to boot it. It worked just fine. It spent a little time sorting out the drivers, then most of an afternoon pulling down the latest updates to 24H2 or whatever and everything was still "just working". On a PC that had been "scrapped" because Windows Update said it was now landfill and could not run Win11.
It does make one wonder which MS config requirements are just hot air and how many others could "upgrade" to Win11 by installing it on an "MS compliant" device and then just moving the drive back into the "landfill" PC.
Personally, I use FreeBSD. But my wife can't/won't switch and I have no control over my work laptop :-/
Who would have thought M$'s arrogance and desire to extract personal information from the privacy conscious by mandating a M$ account for Win11 would be the helping hand Linux needed for the Linux Desktop to finally become mainstream.
I won't run an OS that doesn't install and run with with the Ethernet cable pulled. Windows isn't something I'll miss anyway, good riddance. :)
Microsoft don't care, it's just cutting out people who don't make them any money. The only people who make them money these days are people who subscribe to one of their many services, or who provide eyeballs for their adverts.
The only money they get for a PC sale is from the manufacturer when they have manufactured/sold the PC, after that there's nada, and to a modern business obsessed with sustainable revenue streams and constant growth that's no way to live, since PC sales fluctuate month-to-month and have plateau'd on average over the last few years post-COVID (pre-stocking for Trump's tarriffs notwithstanding).
Said King Louis XIV on April 13, 1655. At Microsoft they took inspiration from the old King, who blessed the world with the Versailles castle, adopting the concept that "The PC is mine". The destruction of 400-800 million PC's in a "Russian Hybrid warfare attack on the West" is something that not even von der Leyen could come up with, that honor goes to those in charge of the one single entity controlling and spying on more people than any dictatorial regime that existed. If the effect is that the world learned that it is a good idea to end its dependence on US Big-tech, it would be a win.
I've gone with the path of least resistance and embraced most of M$'s cloud services to the degree they're handy. For instance, it's really nice to not have to backup and restore files after a reinstall because they're either in my OneDrive or Google Drive. I've lost irreplaceable data before those cloud services, usually due to hardware loss (laptops) but now that is no longer an issue. M$ even stores a lot of your settings in your M$ account.
As a realist, I don't entertain the fantasy of anything resembling privacy in 2025. I just disable whatever telemetry settings I can, then assume the government is reading the rest via M$ (and is bored to tears with the details of my dull life).
Winston Smith approves of your message.
So sure, you have to work at it to preserve any semblance of privacy online. Make the pigfuckers work for it, just on general principle. It's still somewhat doable. Also, not everything you do needs to be online.
Not really sure why this is news. I switched to Linux with Dapper Drake *personally* and have tried rolling the stone uphill ever since.
I feel a little sorry for newbies - obviously they've had to play the hand they are dealt.
But if you are an "experienced IT professional" and you are not running Linux (or at the very least non-MS in a nod to the Apple kids) wherever you possibly can then you only have yourself to blame.
And if you are finding your companies IT costs are rising inexorably, well the time to act was before now.
""While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use," Microsoft said."
What they really mean is "We want to tie you into an online account so we can monitor everything you do and can sell it to advertisers.
Pushing people more and more to Linux the way they are going! I never, NEVER want an online Microsoft account for my Windows install.
Check what is supported. I didn't think to check when I built my new one earlier in the year, after having not had a new build for over 10 years. I assumed the mobo would still have all Windows 10 drivers, but no, the arseholes have decided to not bother implementing the blue tooth drivers of WIFI drivers for Windows 10, so if I want to use those, I'm forced to Windows 11!
Well, my box (W11-capable but buggbear that) has told me I qualify for the +1 year of free ESUs. Not sure why it thinks I backed up my settings, but damn me if I can find the backup file on Onedrive (I uninstalled it, too). So I maybe foolishly went back on my delight at not having constant updates, mainly on the basis that security updates shouldn't start changing my box /too/ much, and enrolled. Another happy year waiting around for updates. :(
Swmbo's however, not W11-capable, won't enrol due to the enrol window opening, then immediately closing, with no apparent fix out there on the interweb. M$ just can't get anything right, can they?
Such bypass was put there, so slightly lesser suckers would be conned into using or installing windows 11 in the end.
Now that most of such sort are mostly dominated serfs on 11, the bypass has been rolled back and it's time for any straggling suckers to be fully dominated.
The only scheme microsoft will not end up rolling back is the ability to easily get a gratis version of windows via an activator on microsoft github - as windows on yet another suckers computer, making that computers theirs, is more valuable to them than the "licensing fee".
>Users who don't want to sign up should perhaps consider whether it's time to look at an alternative operating system instead.
Users should rather look into a free replacement OS that respects their freedom (GNU).
Remember how apple got a technical notice from the UK gov asking them to break their own encryption and they challenged it? Who here honestly believes that MS did not get the same notice. Your data is not at all safe with MS; and NO I am not an Apple fanboi (I have one that I use for testing only) Just stating the bleeding obvious.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
