Disable S mode without a Microsoft account.

This is unfortunately the new paradigm of MS not caring about its partners and resellers. The support system is broken, commissions keep shrinking, costs keep going up and BS like this make our lives harder than ever. The whole windows 11 situation is a joke. We deploy Win10 only because we are not playing the stupid F'ing game of Microsoft account.

Hey Microsoft, want to pay attention here ?! Let us admins set up windows 11 with a 365 domain account instead of your ***** accounts. You know how fun it is creating accounts that will never get used and create issues with cloud services? You do not or you would not have this stupid thing in place. Win 10 to create a proper PC and win 11 upgrade. Only way right now to NOT have a public account.

Microsoft: the main reason for trying Linux!

There are some glaring misconceptions here and I'll do my best to straighten this out for yourself perhaps, and others that come along later looking for a definitive answer to your specific question, along with a couple of other related items you'll likely come across in the process.

I am Dave, I will help you with this...

There is no way to disable S Mode without a Microsoft Account...

@DaveM121, Please don't pay @DaveM121 no nevermind. He couldn't be further from the truth and honestly, providing such an answer is, arguably, doing a disservice to the community.

I'm sure he meant well, but when someone doesn't know the answer it is usually prudent to refrain from just 'taking a stab' at it and offering up an uninformed opinion.

That having been said, it is completely possible and very easy - any professional can got through the steps in a couple of minutes, even for the somewhat non-trivial methods available.

The issue lies with the concept of Windows OS as a moving target; constant updates and releases which change many different aspects of the computing and administration experience moving forward in time - it's much more akin to a rolling Linux Distro nowadays than a static OS that is patched, and is continuously evolving. That is a good thing.

Yet it's also demanding, like walking across shifting sands. The good systems engineer will seek out, as you have done here, solutions to invigorate and migrate machinery in the enterprise towards directions the customer seeks to implement.

So there's right now you'll commonly see 21H2 22H2, and now we're having to think about 22H3 and all of these flavors of Windows 11 Home S Mode have a few incongruencies with each other, so the method that works for you will vary. Sometimes a few of the methods will work and sometimes only one or two will seem to be the one's you need to try for yourself. This, 'sand', that is shifting with updates may affect which solutions are available to you over time.

I'm not going to post some YouTube links but in a nutshell, there's a few well documented methods, one of them being to simply disable Secure Boot in the BIOS. I'll list the steps of another briefly.

You specified Chrome as at least one of the biggest contributing factors here for switching out of S Mode, and that is perhaps the most compelling reason for some, certainly the most commonly cited example, so I wouldn't be surprised to find Chrome in the Microsoft store sometime in the near future (that might keep a few folks from wanting to switch out of S Mode), but then you still wouldn't be able to install other Google products like gdrive and such that you might intend to deploy.

You can also customize Windows 11 and add several utilities and applications (like Google Chrome), or remove extra bloat with tools like BloatyNosy, which I've used and installed from the Microsoft Store - the problem with that, is you still need to use a Microsoft Account to login to the Store. You can even install Chrome without ever launching Edge even once, or using a USB stick. One common use of BloatyNosy in the enterprise is actually completely removing Microsoft Edge, Cortana, and silencing those nagging widgets and notifications permanently in about two seconds.

Fortunately, you can also get it directly from the Git repo HERE.

Contrary to what you'll see elsewhere here in the forums, you can in reality, simply and instantly, switch in and out of S Mode at your convenience - at least if you use the Registry hack - you just change the value in the registry key value back and forth between 0 and 1.

I figured I'd include that little tidbit because there's no much misinformation about that too. You should know however, that as soon as you pop back into S Mode Chrome and other non-Microsoft Store apps will cease to work. They'll work just as they did before once you switch out of S Mode though. I imagine there may be several use cases for being able to do that in the enterprise, while maintaining local user accounts only.

Final thoughts

In closing, I need to mention that the registry method usually works with either Windows Home or Pro, as do some of the other methods - there's a few, but all of this presumes that you've already created local user accounts, which on the Windows 11 Home running in S Mode version, You must have already used one of the various methods out there that enable you to create a local account during the actual installation of Windows 11, without ever having to create a Microsoft account (This will provide you with the greatest degree of flexibility and minimal telemetry) - that can be as simple as disconnecting your Ethernet or WiFi connection when you get to the account creation screen. Again, YouTube has many demonstrations by reputable VARs, including killing the OOBE process in Command Prompt. For the sake of Brevity, I'll leave those others for you to lookup.

I hope that helps!

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This no longer works.

I completely disable OneDrive since it is another pay-per-op service that is not a great bargain, (like MOST of MS!). I prefer to use another online storage system, (even {GADS} Google Drive), as long as I NEVER require any security or privacy with online storage. I use DropBox , (MODERATE security there; and I use it for up to 2TB of storage), and three TB and four TB local drives. If you want it secure, KEEP IT AT HOME!!! Make SURE to back things up and make sure the most important files are on redundant storage devices!