It's easy to complain about Windows 11 and how it's a vehicle for Microsoft to try and force users to embrace certain features that they may not be interested in. A big annoyance that's commonly pointed out as a complaint is the fact that Windows 11 requires you to sign in with a Microsoft account (and therefore, an internet connection) in order to set up your computer.

And while that is officially true, that doesn't mean you actually have to use a Microsoft account with Windows 11 if you're not interested. There are a few workarounds you can still rely on if you just want the classic, offline Windows experience.

You can remove your account after setup

It's mostly for security reasons

Microsoft requires you to connect to the internet and sign in with your Microsoft account during the out-of-box-experience (OOBE) for Windows 11, which is to say, the first time you boot up your computer with it installed. In fact, the company has become increasingly pushy about this, extending this requirement from the Home edition of Windows 11 to the Pro edition as well, assuming you're not signing in with a work or school account.

However, the company has never stopped you from simply removing your account after the fact. Once Windows 11 is set up, you can head into the Settings app and manage your account on Windows 11 to remove the Microsoft account from it. You may also need to do it for individual Microsoft apps, sure, but you're not forced to keep it linked to any of it if you don't want to.

At that point, your Microsoft account is used primarily for two things: storing information about your Windows 11 license so you can easily reset the computer without having to manually activate Windows, and for storing the BitLocker recovery key for your computer's drives. BitLocker automatically encrypts the data on your computer, and to unlock it in the event of an emergency, you need this key, so storing it in our Microsoft account makes it easy to guarantee you never lose access to your data.

You can skip the online experience during setup

Command Prompt to the rescue

Maybe the steps above are still a little annoying for you, though, especially when you may have to do it for multiple Microsoft apps. Thankfully, there's also an official workaround that can skip the entire online portion of the Windows 11 setup. This trick has multiple benefits, actually, because not only can you skip the Microsoft account sign-in, but since you're not connecting to the internet at all, the setup also won't look for updates or offer you all the things Microsoft usually tries to sell you, like Microsoft 365 or PC Game Pass. It becomes way faster to get into your Windows desktop where you can start using your PC normally.

So what do you need to do? Well, it's simple. During Windows 11 setup, when you get to the page asking you to connect to the internet, just ignore that and press Shift + F10 on your keyboard to open the Command Prompt. In this window, type the following command and then press Enter:

start ms-cxh:localonly

This will trigger the offline account creation flow, meaning you can simply pick a username and (optionally) a password for your user account. Complete that process and you'll very quickly be taken to the Windows 11 desktop without any of the fluff that usually drags the setup experience to a crawl. Even if you do want to use your Microsoft account later on, this step saves so much time during setup, so it's highly recommended.

Just disable the requirements

Create modified installation media

If you want to avoid even that part, then there's always the third option: creating a custom installation USB drive. Rufus is a well-known tool for creating bootable USB drives, and it comes with a very useful feature for Windows 10 and 11: the ability to remove the Microsoft account requirement. In fact, Rufus can do a bit more and also remove requirements such as 4GB of RAM or TPM 2.0, which is very helpful.

But it's the Microsoft account bit that matters most here, and while removing the requirement is optional, this option is usually enabled by default so you can always choose to skip it. For this to work, you'll need to download an ISO file from Microsoft's website, or, if you use the Media Creation Tool, create an ISO file instead of USB installation media. Rufus will need to handle the USB part.

You need to be mindful, though. The installation process using the USB drive created with Rufus mostly goes as normal until you get to the OOBE, at which point you'll be asked to connect to the internet. If you want to avoid using a Microsoft account, you need to click I don't have internet, otherwise you will be asked to sign in with a Microsoft account, and the setup itself will be updated to once again require a Microsoft account.

The good news is you can always reinstall Windows with the same flash drive to remove the requirement during setup, which make things a lot easier if you're installing Windows on a lot of machines. Not having to memorize extra commands makes things much simpler, so you may just prefer this method.

It's not all as bad as it sounds

For all the complaining people (including myself) love to do online when it comes to Windows, most of the problems that get talked about tend to have relatively easy workarounds. The Microsoft account requirement is one such example, and if you want the classic experience with just a username and password, that option has always been available and it's seemingly not going anywhere anytime soon. Of course, I'd still prefer using macOS or Linux, but if you're a Windows user, it's not like everything is terrible.