Microsoft wants my soul… and apparently your email address too. In this video I talk through the whole “Windows 11 is forcing Microsoft accounts” drama and why the sky isn’t falling. The big takeaway: if you’re installing Windows 11 Pro or anything higher (Enterprise, IoT, etc.), you’ve got an easy out during setup. When you hit the “work or school” screen, click “Sign-in options” and then “Domain join instead” to make a local account. Windows 11 Home users don’t get that button, which is why the internet is full of hacky workarounds. After that, I get into what I actually did this week: I moved gear around and rebuilt my gaming box into a dual-purpose gaming + AI rig, running Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC. I like LTSC because it’s slim, it’s not some mystery ISO, and it keeps a lot of the bloatware junk out (forced OneDrive/Outlook/AI stuff). I also pulled my two RTX 3060s out of the server to remove the “abstraction layer” headaches and run LM Studio and Ollama directly on Windows, combining VRAM for bigger models. Benchmarks looked solid for a 10th-gen i5 box, and my LLM testing landed right where I wanted it on a 12B model.