Yup, I know what I’m doing, but someone else might have just assumed it was required. I was up and running for a week before a reboot sent me to the smiling windows install screen.

I found it’s a pretty simple “don’t ask to finish installing” switch in the settings, but escaping the install screen was the hard part. I think I had to do a hard power down and force safe mode to access the settings again.

I just reinstalled Windows 11 and holy shit was it hard to setup without a Microsoft account. Like they even use a fake boot up screen weeks later to “finish the install” to trick you into making an account. This can be deactivated, but it is still super shady.

Push and hold the left and right top buttons to put it in maintenance mode. You can do everything normally, but no sound.

It’s about half the price of a flagship phone and projected to have 8 years of support. That seems reasonable.