Switcher 2026: Minimizing the Microsoft in Windows 11 ⭐

Here's a curious conundrum: You use Windows 11, but you also want to minimize your use of other Microsoft products and services. In other words, you wish to use Windows as originally intended, as an OS platform for running the apps and services you prefer, and ideally without the constant nagging to switch back to the Dark Side.

This is, of course, reasonable and possible. Indeed, the computers I use myself are configured such that they bear little resemblance to the system Microsoft shovels at customers via its PC maker partners. Getting from the maximalist default Microsoft/PC maker configuration to my more minimalist needs isn't difficult or time consuming. But what if you want to go further than I typically do? That is, what if you wanted to skip the Microsoft account (MSA) sign-in, the Microsoft Store, OneDrive, and even Microsoft Edge? What might that look like?

Per the editorial From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️, this desired state is a bit more inconvenient than accepting the defaults, meaning it will take more time and a bit more work. But the result is also interesting and useful, and it provides an alternative to leaving Windows for Linux, a Mac, or whatever else. It's not my preferred configuration per se, but given all the time I've spent in Linux recently, I can see the similarities. It's like the best of both worlds.
Initial setup
To test this type of configuration, I started with two of my own laptops, both of which are based on Windows 11 on Arm and Snapdragon X: The Surface Laptop 7 and HP OmniBook 5. Because these are my PCs and neither is new in a box, I used Reset this PC on both to start over. But I could also have created my own Windows 11 install media using Rufus, the publicly available Windows 11 ISO, and, optionally, Tiny11 Builder, to start fresh too. There are advantages to that, but since I've written about this a lot over the past several months and describe the process in my book De-Enshittify Windows 11, I wanted to try a more manual approach this time. A more inconvenient approach, if you will.

The Surface Laptop 7 uses Windows 11 Pro, while the OmniBook 5 uses Windows 11 Home. This is important because using a local account with Windows 11 Pro is "better" for one important reason, described below. But you can install either, from the get-go, with a local account (instead of an MSA or Microsoft Work and School account) if you prefer.

I didn't reconfigure the two PCs at the same time, I did this back-to-back. But in both cases, I chose to "remove everything" in Reset this PC, waited the 20 minutes or so that each required to do its thing, and then was briefly blinded as the stark white Windows Setup Out of Box Experience (OOBE) appeared so I could step through that process and configure each PC.

If you're not familiar with the OOBE, you can find a step-by-step guide in the Install chapter of the Windows 11 Field Guide. But I didn't see most of that. After Next-ing past the first three...