Heads Up! Microsoft Account bricked my sister's laptop
My sister put Microsoft Account (MA) on her computer and hasn't been able to log in to her laptop, due to it failing. I asked her (wrongly) to delete the account; and to be fair she did. However, that didn't make the inability to log in go away, and I created a new account for her.
After several hours of faffing about, I ended up in an infinite boot loop, where I would log in to MA and it would continuously kick me out with no access to the single desktop administrator account I created for her previously. I told her NOT to put MA on the account; but there were no problems until a couple of days ago. Being a helpful sort usually, this caused me to lose it (almost) completely, (lots of cursing and shouting), mainly directed at Microsoft.
MA broke, repeatedly asking me to create a PIN, to which there were two options: retry or skip for now. As it was broken this is where the aforementioned boot loop began; the pop up box said "We can't do this right now" or whatever. Retry just went round and round, and skipping would just log me out. Looking around on the internet suggested a reinstall of Windows 10, which took 6 hours. The worrying part of this is now that this is part of reinstalling Windows 10/11. You have to create a Microsoft Account even though it serves no purpose whatsoever.
I created a local account without the MA access, and have told me sister under no circumstances link it to MA. I understand that this is set to be compulsory with W11 that you have to log in to MA to access your computer. This kills any idea of me buying a new computer. AI kills it even more. Why should I have to log into a computer 5000 miles away to get the laptop in front of me to work? There's no tangible benefit in doing so.
I would urge anyone to create a separate local administrator account without MA access so you can avoid trashing your data/install like I had to. There is a happy ending though; the laptop now boots up as it should, and there is no MA involved. Windows Update, though, is another story... If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.