New workstation setup

I bought a new workstation this month (Dell Precision 7730 notebook) and in the course of setting it up I kept banging my head against Windows security. I was just trying to map drives and set up Remote Desktop between the new Windows 11 machine and my old Windows 10 notebook. I started to suspect it had something to do with Windows Hello authentication- how can I use an account password to access Windows when I never used it to set up the computer?

Eventually I starting asking the right questions and found this thread on superuser.com:

How to login windows remote desktop (RDP) in windows 11 when Microsoft account and Hello Pin enabled? – Super User

The important part is this line, “use the Runas command by entering runas /u:MicrosoftAccount\your@email.com cmd.exe

Runas is the Windows way to run a command as a different user (see su (Unix) – Wikipedia ). From a shell, you open another shell with your Microsoft account, it asks for a password, and suddenly Windows knows that you have a password. (Opening a new shell because it is just something easy and convenient to do from a shell.)

After I did that, I was able to open the Remote session with no issues. I can now keep my old laptop under the desk and I don’t have to open it or confuse myself with which mouse & keyboard I’m using in order to move stuff to the new computer.

I still don’t have drives mapped and at this point I may pull the second hard drive out of my old laptop and use it with a Raspberry Pi to set up a NAS. The purpose will be for on-site backup.


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