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Microsoft Account to local account conversion guide erased from official Windows 11 guide — instructions redacted earlier this week (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Microsoft has been pushing hard for its users to sign into Windows with a Microsoft Account. The newest Windows 11 installer removed the easy bypass to the requirement that you make an account or login with your existing account. If you didn't install Windows 11 without a Microsoft Account and now want to stop sending the company your data, you can still switch to a local account after the fact. Microsoft even had instructions on how to do this on its official support website - or at least it used to...

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[–] extratone 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I appreciate all of the privacy and ethics-associated reasons why it is preferable to start a Windows 11 installation with a local account, but if I could just add one more...

When you use a Microsoft account to do so, the operating system still requires a fucking username for the name of your user directory (because a local account must be created regardless, yes,) and all it has to go on is the email address you used to set up your Microsoft account.

A few years ago when I first installed Windows 11 on my home PC, the email address still associated with my primary account was [email protected].

So, what do you think my user account folder was named? You'd probably assume it'd be ihadtopee, right?

No. Through whatever process they set up to decide upon this, Windows 11 came up with ihadt.

Perhaps it makes me a superficial person, but that shit bugs me far more than anything else about the whole thing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It can be more than superficial. If you're restoring files from your old PC to your new one, it could make a mess of things if the user account is in a different path. Probably not a lot of people write scripts for their windows PC, but those could break.

Sure it would be a janky restore or janky script if it was explicitly specifying the path of the home directory instead of the environment variable. But environment variables have been janky in the past on windows, so it's best to just keep the paths as consistent as possible when migrating to a new system.

Kinda shit they just wouldn't prompt you for what you want your home director called tho.

Also, LOL at your email address.