Installing with Local account only, as of Oct13/26

I've been setting up a new Lenovo P1 Gen9 laptop and had almost despaired that all the local-account-only setup methods had been obliterated. The other issue was that I wasn't sure which preinstalled version the laptop came with. I'm setting it up for personal use, not school or business.

The "Learn More" route (the tiny text in the paragraph, as opposed to the larger button at the bottom of the MS account setup dialog screen) for skipping the MS account setup didn't work for me. Nor did a couple of other methods. YMMV, of course, but I've built desktop systems since before Windows so ...

I started considering reinstalling Windows from a fresh MS download, using Rufus, which would do only as a last resort because I didn't have time to do the overhead of additional setup after that, I wanted to be close to ready to go. Fortunately I did find a method—which has been mentioned here on the forum—and it worked perfectly.

So, as a thank you to those here who continue to champion the Local Only route, these are the links that I finally followed. Again, this method has been mentioned on the forum, not a diss to those posts, it's just that I found this particular presentation was easiest to follow.


YouTube link for the video linked on the above page

1. In "How would you like to set up this device?", I chose "Set up for Work or School".
2. "Let Windows access your location?" Yes.
3. Press Shift+Fn+F10 (Note: some systems only need Shift+F10) to open a cmd.exe window.
4. Code:

   net user "User Name" /add
   
   net localgroup "Administrators" "User Name" /add
   
   cd OOBE
   
   msoobe && shutdown -r

5. As the system reboots, note that there is an error message, "The user name or password is incorrect", which can be disregarded.

In addition:

You can still use either step below when you get to them in this tutorial to create a local account instead of a Microsoft account during Windows Setup.

step 15 = This step uses the start ms-cxh:localonly or start ms-cxh://setaddlocalonly command to set up a local account with network.

step 17 = The red warning box under this step uses the reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f command to bypass network requirements to then be able to set up a local account.

step 22 = The blue tip box under this step has you use the Domain join instead option that allows you to set up a local account with network.