Thanks to Microsoft’s relentless drive to enshittify Windows we’ve all been playing ‘cat and mouse’ with their need to force logins to Microsoft accounts when Windows first boots. Microsoft’s push to force online logins is stupid and frustrating; and it won’t stop. Here’s a fix that I modified to improve so you have more options.

As an I.T. person, just about the most common task is setup Windows 11, and in so doing, need to create a local account. You probably know many of the reasons this is important from the computer being completely offline, to wanting to do firmware updates or software changes. The alternative, of course, is wasting time logging into a Microsoft account I’ll never use.

So far, here’s a list of bypasses that Microsoft has killed off. These are run from a command prompt you access on first boot with SHIFT+F10:

1. OOBE/BYPASSNRO – a script that did all the heavy lifting but was probably the first to go.
2. start ms-cxh:localonly – another bypass also killed off.

Thanks to Christitus’ approach, I decided to take that and modify it slightly, changing the base account to “Owner” and hosting the two files needed on our own Webdav server. I will further tweak this if I can. If you want to host this on your own site, you just need the two files bypass and unattend.xml.

Here’s how to run this bypass:

1. Take a freshly installed Windows 11 computer, answer a few questions and connect to the Internet.
2. Once connected, open the command prompt with the SHIFT+F10. Run the next two commands:

> curl -L live.cwl.cc/bypass -o skip.cmd
> skip.cmd

You’ll see the computer reboot, ask one or two more questions and then you’re logged in locally. The Owner account has no password. Is there anything else you’d add to the unattend.xml?