Victor, read the EULA. This is one of the ways in which everything you do can be recorded and tracked. All in the name of "user experience" research, of course.

In any case, I log in with a simple username+password only, not an email address. When installing Win8 (or when setting it up on a new machine which came with Win8) you do have an option to not use an email address for logging in but just a simple username. But this is not the default option and it is done in a non-obvious way. If I remember correctly, when the point during setup comes you have to leave the email address blank, or something, and then another option appears (or there is a small hyperlink you can click) where you can enter just a username for logging in instead. This link might help:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/quick-tip-change-to-a-local-account-in-windows-81/

However, I found that once you enter that email address there is no obvious way to remove it. It's somewhere in the system and I am sure that somehow this is tied to everything you do and bundled with your "user experience" statistics back to MS.

This point that you mention is one of the things I found really not-OK with Win8.






>Yes that's true - but I don't want to have to log into my windows machine with an email address - I just want to use a typical username/password.
>I don't understand why I just can't log into windows with a typical username/address and then setup each of the tiles/apps that want an email account with an email account. Plus the Skype thing is really stupid because I want to use my skype username not my microsoft account. It's crap like this that made me switch from a windows phone to an android phone and I see why MS is forever losing ground and has a shrinking user-base on the desktops and tablets. So basically in a nutshell - there is no way for me to do this? It seems like an obvious request that every user would want.
>
>>You can register any email address as a Microsoft account.
>>
>>>So I'm finally starting to play around with windows 8.1 and noticed something that kinda bothers me. If I want to use things like Skype or OneDrive (and some other things) from the tile menu, it asks me to log into my tablet with my Microsoft Account. But doing so means now I'm logged into my PC with my MS account, not the account I setup for myself. That really REALLY stinks! For Skype it's easy enough work-around -I just run the desktop version of Skype and not the windows 8.1 version. But I want to use the windows 8.1 version. Is there a way around this? If not then Microsoft has ticked me off (again).