Microsoft account refuseniks have another way of installing Windows

OS PLATFORMS

Has the good bork fairy paid a visit to Redmond?

A new loophole to avoid Microsoft’s insistence that you need a Microsoft account to use the Home edition of Windows 11 has appeared, and it’s so ludicrously simple we can only assume the good bug fairy has paid a visit to Redmond.

The workaround is in the normal Windows 11 Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) that users see when setting up the operating system.

Get to the point where Windows prompts for a Microsoft account, then click the “Learn more” hyperlink beneath the text box and the Sign-in options link, and the OOBE skips to prompting for the user’s name and eventually a password. Just like it used to do before Microsoft decided that you needed one of its accounts to use the software you thought you’d paid for.

“Bob Pony” created a helpful post demonstrating the workaround. We checked it, and it worked…