Local Windows 11 with Choco.

I got to set up a couple of new laptops with Windows 11. As they were intended for educational purposes Microsoft cloud account was out of the question and I needed to bypass it.

On top of that I had to admit I didn’t fancy installing the same selection of apps manually on each of them - thus decided to use package manager, in this case Chocolatey.

Here are the steps I went through:

Windows 11 installation

  • turned on the laptops, waited for the installation process to start up
  • made sure NONE of the laptops are connected to the net
  • when asked about connecting to the net and creating the MS account pressed “shift + F10”. In the command line that appeared I’ve entered:
taskkill /F /IM oobenetworkconnectionflow.exe
  • (alternatively you can bring up the task manager with “Win+T” and close the offending process; this kind of stuff is always a game with MS - they patch the workaround, the community finds another one)
  • the installation proceeded with the option of local account creation
  • when the install finished I’ve connected the net. Mind that Windows can still ask about MS account during first time login on each new account, but this time there’s a clear path to skip it.

Chocolatey

  • downloaded this package manager following the steps found here: https://chocolatey.org/install
  • in lots of cases it is a good idea to open PowerShell with admin priviliges and use this:
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
  • after this Chocolatey package manger should be ready to use

Installing apps with Chocolatey

  • open Power Shell with admin priviliges and start installing the apps using “choco” command. In my case that was:
choco install obs-studio godot vlc python meshmixer git sumatrapdf reaper zoom vscode arduino 7zip googlechrome ublockorigin-chrome inkscape krita autodesk-fusion360 -y
  • the installation of all those should start, thus you save quite a lot of time downloading / installing on each machine
  • mind that if you install from public choco repos and use quite large number of PCs you’ll probably pass the maximum connections quota - thus you’ll see and error and you’ll have to wait 15 minutes (or so - can’t really recall) before install proceeds. Still better than doing the installs manually on each machine ;) .

Closing thoughts

As Windows has recieved “official” package manager, winget, it’s worth considering using it instead - I have a hunch in a long run winget will be more popular choice.

Also creating own repo, or even handling much of the installs / updates using Ansible might be a good idea, especially in slightly larger deployments.