I bought a new Lenovo with Windows 11 preinstalled and apparently if I want to use this laptop I need to have a Microsoft account
I bought a new Lenovo with Windows 11 preinstalled and apparently if I want to use this laptop I need to have a Microsoft account
Is there any way around this? Why is Windows doing this? Don't get me wrong, I got the laptop to install a Linux distro anyway, but it's helpful for others (especially my older family members) to just use Windows when they need to print a paper or do a small task, so I would have liked to keep it. Microsoft really lost me here.
Edit:
Thanks everyone for the answers. For reasons I will not delve into now, I ended up installing Windows 10 from the official iso Image, then upgrading to Windows 11. This is the longest and shittiest way to avoid the login as it simply used the local account I created on Windows 10, and that's the road I took (not recommended). Also I ended up installing Mint with dual boot and I love it. I have windows on the smallest partition size possible (about 66G).
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If you have another computer, download the Windows 11 iso from Microsoft.
Then download Rufus and use it to make a bootable USB key from the before mentioned Iso. It will ask if you want to disable Microsoft account requirement, as well as other things like TPM requirement and the likes.
Install Windows from that USB key
Just a heads up, this probably won't work. I tried it recently.
My Lenovo PC said "there's a media driver missing" after booting off a USB and wouldn't load any other file off any drive besides the one it booted off of.
You need to get the Lenovo ISO with built in drivers and bloatware, which you will have to "order" a digital download for using your serial number to install Windows on.
It's probably some DRM or forced spyware, because my USB drives had the drivers they needed to boot from but I was shut out of seeing any files (like a driver) on other devices.
You're just missing a NVMe driver or something. Not that uncommon for systems that release after the OS did
Which I had the driver for but could not load because the windows installer would not let me load any file from any flash drive (excepting the internals of the iso that booted off the flash drive).