Agreed, MS’s aggressive market capture is horrible to work with. Sucks that it’s the consumer standard AND the industry standard. So much bullshit to sift through when configuring the computers for a work environment.

Anyways, just a heads up for future installs; you can bypass the sign-in screen during the Windows install and create a local account. It’s annoying to do, convoluted by design. But still not nearly as annoying as signing in to a Microsoft account.

Edit: additionally if you are going to use Windows, I would suggest one of the LTSC builds, removes most of the bloat and gets at least 10 years of support.

It really does lol. In my helpdesk queue I have some tickets from over a month ago, sometimes I need to reach god-like focus to finally break down the steps / mentally process their request and respond to them haha.