Windows 11 and Surface are still bad

I needed to use Power BI for work, and alas, this meant needing to use Windows (Whisky won’t cut it unfortunately...)

There was a spare Surface Laptop 5 I could use, but just getting to the desktop was a total PITA. It has been lightly used but recently wiped back to OOBE.

Because it is a Windows 11 Home machine (a huge mistake) you cannot login with a Microsoft 365 account setup for work (only personal accounts are allowed). So I used the good old oobe\bypassnro command but also kept getting this screen:

IMG_2803.jpeg

Frankly bizarre to be getting this during the Windows setup, with a Surface no less.

Anyway, it was fine apart from the screen acting as a mirror and apocalyptically bad battery life, until I needed to restore the damn thing for the next person. It absolutely refused to - it would reboot and I would get the spinning circles with “Restoring Windows...” But it would crap out at 45% and reboot normally. Tried several times with different options and settings, but ended up resorting to the recovery USB - which annoyingly was a 15GB file.

Ugh, please just let me emulate Power BI on Linux, and by extension, macOS.