Microsoft kills official Windows 11 guide for swapping to local account

Microsoft insists that everyone uses an online account for Windows 11, to the point of deleting its official guide for using a local account.

Anyone who has set up Windows 11 knows that it tries to railroad you into using or setting up an online Microsoft account. While in theory this allows users to sync multiple devices, many people are not keen on having to set up yet another account and remember yet another password.

You can get around this by logging in using a local Windows account. Microsoft has done everything it can to obfuscate this and has now gone one step further by erasing part of its own official customer service site.

Microsoft’s service page provides several guides on various functions and processes in Windows. Examples of this include a guide on how to move from a local-only offline account to an online Microsoft Account. Up until recently, a guide existed for the reverse process, how to move from an online Microsoft Account to a local one. This seems to have disappeared.

The change was discovered by Tom’s Hardware, which found that the most recent update to the guide page had removed all information on how to move from a connected Microsoft account to a local one.

This update was made sometime around June 17 and the original version of the guide is still available via the Wayback Machine. An older Windows 10 version for creating a local user still exists for now.

It is still possible to use Windows 11 as a local user, though it involves creating an online account and then migrating off it. You can also use apps like Rufus to remove any baggage during installation.

Microsoft appears to be doing everything it can to force users into creating an online account, with little regard to legitimate reasons why a user might want to keep a device isolated from the internet.