When you are setting up a fresh install with Windows 11, Microsoft makes it very difficult to not sign in with a Microsoft account, unless you’re on Windows 11 Pro, and even then it’s quite non-obvious how to sign in with a local account.
Even after you’ve got past this stage, the next hurdle is that the machine will then sit there for 30–45 minutes or more and install a bunch of Windows Updates.
There used to be a button in the setup wizard to skip this, but in all recent installs I’ve done, there is no option to skip it.
Fortunately a solution is at hand.
Hit Shift+F10 to open up a command prompt window – sometimes this window will be behind the setup wizard, so you can use alt+tab to switch to it.
In this window, type in:
start ms-cxh:localonly
and hit enter.
This will immediately bring up a window where you can enter some local account details, and then it’ll sign you in and drop you on to the Desktop.
Once you’re in Windows, do make sure you go into Start > Settings > Windows Update and install all outstanding updates – at least when you’re doing it this way, you can use the machine normally and continue getting everything set up while the updates run.
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