You mentioned recovery disks in the last response. How does that differ from creating a recovery on a flash disk?
The hp info says you can only create one recovery "disk" and that you can use either CDs or a usb flash drive. I was going to opt for a flash drive rather than CDs just because it takes up less space for storage and I have more CDs laying around now that I really need.
Is there any advantage to using CDs for the recovery to the factory fresh state over a USB flash disk?
I also us a local account for my windows login. I don't see the need to be logged in to a microsoft account online to use apps locally. Further, it seems to me that you would need to be online to use a microsoft account and when traveling, that may not always be possible, so I think a local account is a better option to log in to Windows.