Recently I have been tasked with manually imaging a large number of windows machines for an IT company that just hired me. The problem I faced, however, was that right out of the box Microsoft will try and force you into registering a Microsoft account to your device. This wasn’t useful to me or my clients and I’m sure there are many other like minded people who prefer local accounts. How annoying. Here’s how you can bypass this for the time being!
Step 1: Initial Setup
Make sure that you don’t have an ethernet cable plugged in and are not connected to any networks before starting. Commence the Windows setup process, proceeding through the initial steps until reaching the network configuration screen.
If you mistakenly connected to Wi-Fi already: skip to here to learn how to forget the network in setup.
Step 2: Bypassing Wi-Fi Configuration
Back in the good old days you would just have a option to say “I don’t have internet” here but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom removed this form the default experience.
What you are going to want to do is press Shift + F10 on your keyboard in order to bring up the console. Don’t worry we won’t be spending too much time in here. Type this into the console and hit enter:
OOBE\BYPASSNRO
Your computer should restart and now you should have the “I don’t have internet” option. Click this and you can proceed with your system startup without the annoying Microsoft account. Have fun!
If You Accidentally Connected To Wi-Fi
Forgetting a Wi-Fi network is a bit more involved but don’t worry, I have your back.
Open Command Prompt just like above using Shift + F10 and type the following command to list all saved Wi-Fi profiles:
netsh wlan show profilesFind the profile of the Wi-Fi network you want to forget and then enter the following command to make Windows forget it:
netsh wlan delete profile name="[Wi-Fi Network Name]"Replace [Wi-Fi Network Name] with the actual name of the network you found earlier.
You should be good to just restart the machine after doing so and then proceed with the guide as normal.