Bowch's Blog - Games & Software

Install Windows 11 Without A Microsoft Account

nospam@example.com (Andrew Bowers) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 15:04:00 +0000

One of the bugbears with installing Windows 11 is that you need an internet connection and Microsoft Account.

Pressing Shift + F10 during the setup would open a Command Prompt and you could type:

oobe\bypassnro

This would enable a button to skip connecting to the internet.

Microsoft has now removed this command.

However, there is still another option. Open a Command Prompt with Shift + F10 and type the following:

start ms-cxh:localonly

An older, Windows 10 style interface will pop up, and you can then specify a username and password for the local account; skipping the need for an internet connection and Microsoft account.

Tale Of A Wolf

nospam@example.com (Andrew Bowers) — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 13:50:00 +0000

EXPERIENCE THE LIFE OF A WOLF
Tale Of A Wolf is a story driven open world adventure game where you harness the essence of the fallen to increase your own strength.

Ako, a naive canine, discovers this abruptly as he meets mankind for the first time and sees their wicked ways for himself. You will have to survive the wildlands and reclaim the island to restore the natural balance of the diverse ecosystem on Sylvanna.

THE STORY IS YOURS TO TELL
Set in the beautiful isles of Sylvanna, the time of tranquility is over, man has landed on the shores and they are setting up camps all over the island. You can decide to stalk your human prey and take them down silently one by one. Or if you wish, use the power of fire to burn down the encampments sprawled across the land.

Coming December 2020

New PC

nospam@example.com (Andrew Bowers) — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 10:45:00 +0000

I built my old PC system way back in July 2009 and it's slowly been getting a bit long in the tooth; it still played games fairly well, mainly thanks to the fact that I had upgraded the memory and gfx card along the way. However, earlier this year I thought it was high time to upgrade and build myself a new PC. I started building mid-July 2019 and it has the following components in it:

Aerocool Aero-500-RGB-WH ATX Mid Tower Case
Corsair TXM Gold 650W 80+ Gold PSU
5x Arctic F12 74 CFM 120 mm Case Fans

AMD Ryzen 3 1200 CPU
Gigabyte X470 AORUS ULTRA GAMING Motherboard
16 GB (2 x 8 GB) Kingston HyperX Predator DDR4-3200 Memory

Gigabyte Radeon RX 570 4 GB AORUS Video Card

Gigabyte 256 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Boot Drive
ADATA SU800 2 TB 2.5" Solid State Games Drive
Patriot Blast 960 GB 2.5" Solid State Storage Drive

Even with the upgraded GFX card (an R9 380X) my old PC only ever really managed medium settings at best in most modern games. So far, everything I've tried on the new PC, I have managed to run at High/Very High/Ultra as appropriate in each game with no noticeable slow-down; although, I did have to use a 60fps limit in Guild Wars 2.

PC PartPicker Component List

Doom:

Vampyr:

Elite Dangerous:

Guild Wars 2:

Battletech

nospam@example.com (Andrew Bowers) — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 13:39:00 +0000

Battletech Website / Steam Product Page