[Closed] New PC Windows setup question

Don’t even want a microsoft account if I can help it, but those days have gone

You don't need a Microsoft account, you can set it up with a local account.

If you want a local account rather than having to use a Microsoft one (and you're really better off using an MS account IMHO) then don't connect it to the Internet during setup.

Is it still a good idea to have an admin account and normal user account?

Depends whether you've got Win 10 Pro or Home.

Pro will let you setup with a local account.

Home *really* tries to push you to create a Microsoft account. The only way you can do it is by starting the process then disconnecting from internet (as Cougar says above).

https://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-10/how-to-setup-windows-10-without-a-microsoft-account/

Another tip after you've set it up is to disable the reminder to create a MS account after you've set it all up - this happened to my Mrs the other day and she blindly created an MS account that she didn't need.

https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-showing-prompt-sign-microsoft-services-heres-how-stop-it

HTH

Cheers all, it's arrived but I have stuff to do, so I'll tackle it tonight. Local account with empty password and not having to sign in when I turn it on sounds possible, but tricksy.

Signing in really isn't a big deal IMO - my desktop is a 4 digit pin and my Surface Pro 7 is face recognition

Control userpasswords2
From the command line - lets you auto log in as a particular user.
If that's a non-admin user all the better.

Signing in is a big deal, if there's six of us in the house, we'd all need to know the up to date passwords all the time, to all of the computers(got it down to seven now, doing well). So we keep a no password regime to use a computer, and anything you need secured or hidden, we deal with that separately and locally. We're not averse to using the services, we just don't want them all interconnected by default.

Yay. I made it. Do I have that "new computer" smell?

Kept the network cable out and declined to provide the wifi password until the installation finished. Answered the "Who Are You?" question with HPUser and left the following password selection blank. Answered no to all the Cortana and data sharing questions and generally held on to my "don't even think about it!" attitude until it got the message. Once I was happy that was working as intended and rebooting without a password(It has deafaulted HPUser to Admin status), I cleared out the bloatware, poked about the rest of the privacy and security settings and set up Firefox. Office365 is happy enough checking my account on it's startup rather than boot, as is the Microsoft Store, so, so far so good. Thanks for all your help, as always.

Now, if you want a cheap PC, with limited, but also quite impressive upgrade potential, I'm playing with the HP M01-F0013na for the sum of £229 (tower, keyboard and mouse only). It takes up to Ryzen 5 CPUs, DDR4 up to 400MHz, PCI-e gen4.0 and empty M2 slot for SSD to go with the 1TB HDD provided.

Signing in is a big deal, if there’s six of us in the house, we’d all need to know the up to date passwords all the time

Alternatively if you all have Office365 accounts and use those to sign in then you can all login on whatever of the machines are free with your normal password (which will always be the same on all the machines) and your files are there on whichever machine you use.  Open Word and you pick up where you left on the last machine.  It's difficult to beat really if you are happy to pay for the family licence

I won't disagree on the usefulness of the integration, it's more a case of every OS and app seems to want to scrape all your stuff and make it available everywhere, all the time. We're more of "if I put it there, I don't want it showing up over there without me explicitly copying it". We can do cloud backups and we have a fire safe full of physical ones, just a bit exhausting when how we want to do things is at odds with Microsoft etc.