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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

281–290 of 490 posts

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#281
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

Solution: run Windows in a VM, one machine per account, nuke it from orbit when-not-if something goes awry. Hundreds of hours of frustration prevented from a system that is not even able to have the same UI across all its windows.

How do you get an instance of licensed Windows to run within the VM?

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting it home - it literally cannot be used without signing into a Google account. I bought it thinking, "hey nice, I can use this 4K Android home theatre device without Google being involved, since it's from NVIDIA and thus hopefully free of all that crap". I even did my homework on this: no material included with the produ…

I was looking at a media center/gaming emulation device and to be honest i dont see the benefit of these android based TV devices or Apple TV anymore. You can buy a good mini-pc for a couple hundred bucks and its much more powerful and flexible. You can run windows or linux etc and hook up any keyboard, controller, remote, and do whatever you like.

> You can buy a good mini-pc for a couple hundred bucks and its much more powerful and flexible. You can run windows or linux etc and hook up any keyboard, controller, remote, and do whatever you like.

More flexible, yes, but are you really getting more powerful than an A15 for that price, especially when running a general purpose OS?

That last point is really hurting why media PCs disappeared: you’re paying considerably more - a whole number multiple - for an experience which isn’t designed for a TV, and in return you get the fun of playing sysadmin when you’re trying to relax. Most people are not going to pay a significant premium so they can deal with drivers and trying to figure out why their HDR isn’t working. Device lifetime theoretically could counter that out but I’m skeptical that hardware won’t be what sets the timing for that in either case, and the dollars per year metric isn’t favorable there.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#283
post #108

Am I the only one who uses browser profiles to separate my personal browsing from work or other organizations I'm a part of? When I mention this approach to people they give me a strange look like I'm crazy. In Chrome you just create a new profile for each identity you have. If you're opening random incognito windows or using different browsers all the time to log in with different identities, you should be creating…

I go even further, corporate laptop for work, personal laptop for personal stuff.

I go even further. Two completely separate households - one for work, one for personal.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#284
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that Windows 11 and above (try very hard to) require a Microsoft account, because these orcas of computing want to remind you with every step that you don't own the device you bought. Hence it's simpler/better to just virtualize everything. Then they do absolutely crazy weird things! I recently got a new laptop. My account is `adavis@ .com`, my user name on my old laptop using that account is `adavis…

I once tried doing the prudent thing and give them an individualized email address on a catchall subdomain, now my user name on Windows 11 is "win10". Because why ask for a username if you have an email address, right? Might get interesting when your email is administrator@ or guest@, I don't get the impression that anyone at Microsoft has even the slightest idea what actually goes on in their schizophrenic SSO multi…

It only uses the first 5 letters so administrator should be fine (“admin” isn’t a built-in). Guest could be interesting, though.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#285

Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. When I was a city councillor I had a corporate O365 account from the council (used for council email and virtual meetings over teams) and simply trying to sign out of the thing or switch to another account was always fraught (I've got a personal account that's basically just to associate my windows license with and a work account used for azure access). You'd often end up in a s…

Because of a quirk of my employment, my AAD account was deleted and recreated, which means I now have two Azure DevOps accounts with the same email, one of which is unlicensed (and not attached to an AAD identity). It is fairly random which one it tries to sign me in with, and every once in a while clicking on a link in ADO will sign me out because it got confused about who I was. It’s insane, and there’s no way to nuke the old account.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#286
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue has been bugging me since Windows 7. Only "proper" solution is to /not/ sign into your MS account when seeting up the new machine for the first time. Create a local account with the name as you want it, and then only afterwards link it with your MS account (if you have to). Only problem is, latest Win11 installer does not allow you to create a local account anymore at all. So you need to install Win10, do…

If you can't bypass the Win11 online account requirement by being offline during install, then try this: In the "Let's connect you to a network" page, use these steps: * Use the Shift + F10 keyboard shortcut to open Command Prompt. * Type the following command to release the current network configuration and press Enter: oobe\bypassnro Note: The command is a single phrase without spaces. Note2: This will reboot the m…

I just use a@a.com which is a locked account someone setup for this purpose. It kicks you to local user setup due to being locked.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#287
My wife basically had all the problems you guys are talking about with her Minecraft account. When Mojang was independent none of this stuff was an issue but with MS you're practically pulling your hair out to do really basic stuff.

100% pure regression with account management.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

Have you tried the competing software in a business environment, it is pretty easy to see why MS productivity software dominates. For like $12/u/month you get full web and desktop office software, MFA, and AzureAD, which you can use as a SSO indentity provider for free, for one lisc that cost $4/m you can then make use of conditional access policies that give you massive options over how you manage an access all aspe…

Can you give more details on the "1 TB per user pool for shared office resources"? I always thought there was a user-level limit of 1 TB for OneDrive, and a organization-level limit of 1 TB + (10 GB)*(number of users) for Sharepoint.[0]

And I've never found any documentation as to whether shared OneDrive folders count against the owner's quota, all of the users with permissions quota, or the sharepoint quota.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescripti...

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#289
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that Windows 11 and above (try very hard to) require a Microsoft account, because these orcas of computing want to remind you with every step that you don't own the device you bought. Hence it's simpler/better to just virtualize everything. Then they do absolutely crazy weird things! I recently got a new laptop. My account is `adavis@ .com`, my user name on my old laptop using that account is `adavis…

This issue has been bugging me since Windows 7. Only "proper" solution is to /not/ sign into your MS account when seeting up the new machine for the first time. Create a local account with the name as you want it, and then only afterwards link it with your MS account (if you have to). Only problem is, latest Win11 installer does not allow you to create a local account anymore at all. So you need to install Win10, do…

I believe Rufus lets you bypass microsoft account setup on windows 11 when creating a bootable USB

https://rufus.ie/en/

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

Have you tried the competing software in a business environment, it is pretty easy to see why MS productivity software dominates. For like $12/u/month you get full web and desktop office software, MFA, and AzureAD, which you can use as a SSO indentity provider for free, for one lisc that cost $4/m you can then make use of conditional access policies that give you massive options over how you manage an access all aspe…

> but seriously for the money, no one touchs what MS is offering right now. Google had MS hands down 10 years ago, and let google apps die on the vine

You're right, for the money MS gives the user a lot of fairly crappy products (other than the office desktop suite). Google was positioned to own this, and they let is drop. It shows what it means to be a product driven company (MS) vs. whatever Google does nowadays (milk search ads?).

There are teams of people in MS whose only job is to think about how to package something for sale. If Google had a single person doing that they would have beat Slack before it got huge, and could have owned office collaboration software as it all moved to the web.

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