Reinstall windows for new user

[deshepherd]

I'm wanting to pass on my old laptop to someone else and ideally wanted it to look as close to a new laptop as posisble to them with no traces of me left on it. I used start/setup/accounts & security/reset to reinstall windows deleting everything ... however this insists on a microsoft account login - while it says you can switch to a local logion later the details of my account were still there which I don't want.
Is there any way to (re)install windows 10 without using a microsoft account ... or can you use one to complete the install and then expunge all reference to it afterwards?
And as a minor further irritant ... the reinstall also added the bloatware that original came on the laptop.
Would it be better to download a win10 image to a usb stick and start from there?

 

[darael]

Downloading and transferring a Windows 10 image to a USB stick is what I would do.

Does the laptop have a hard drive or SSD drive? If you're worried about them recovering any files and it has a hard drive, then I would run a full format on it - if it has an SSD, use something like Parted Magic to secure erase it. Parted Magic can be found on UBCD, but I find it can sometimes be problematic on newer machines, as UBCD only supports legacy BIOS booting.

If you didn't choose to either secure erase or full format the drive, then when you boot from the Windows 10 USB stick and you are shown the partitions, make sure that you delete all the ones on the laptop's HDD or SSD.

One thing to note. Don't connect the laptop to your internet during setup - so either remove the ethernet cable, or skip past the wireless connection wizard. This should force setup to prompt you to create a local account, or at least make the choices more obvious.