A friend of mine asked me if I had a spare laptop that they could borrow for a few days. Since I had a spare one that is used for my experiments I told them yes. To ensure that everything was working before I handed it over to them I booted up the laptop. The system started up and installed a bunch of updates before even it give me the login prompt. I let it update and then once all the updates were applied I ended up on the Login page which is where this whole painful odyssey started.
The laptop was originally used by one of the Employees in Jani’s company that was retired because they needed a faster computer. It had multiple accounts created on it, one for the user and one administrator account for me (which was a local account). The login page was only showing me the option to login as the employee using their Microsoft account. Usually there is an option to select alternate accounts from a list (or enter them manually) but in this case that wasn’t the case. Even though I had local logins enabled on the laptop I was not getting any option to select other users.
I then spent a whole lot of time trying to enable local user on the system by booting into recovery mode and manually adding the users. All the steps I tried were for Windows 10 because that is what was installed on the laptop but after a while of trying I noticed that the recovery screen mentioned something about recovering/resetting the Windows 11 system on the laptop. That is when I realized that the stupid thing had upgraded to Windows 11 and since Windows 11 makes it difficult to have local accounts it had removed the option of selecting the alternate accounts.
The only option I had to login was to request a login code sent to the employee’s email account and use that to log in. But by this time I was considering doing a full reinstall since even after logging in I would have to re-configure the system for my use and and if I was doing that I might as well do a full format and reinstall the OS.
Finally I ended up reinstalling windows 10 on the machine and surprise surprise everything was working the way to supposed to work. Thankfully I didn’t have any data on the machine that I didn’t that I minded use losing so it was easy to reset and reinstall. Now I just need to make sure the stupid thing doesn’t upgraded in again but since this time my account is a primary account on the machine I’ll still be able to login even if the system upgrades to windows 11.
I really dislike working with Windows and everytime I have to I end up wasting tons of time solving stupid issues I don’t see on Linux.
– Suramya