LegacySupport.md

How to make use of this project on older Windows systems

First, note that Home versions of Windows do not ship with GPO (Local Group Policy), therefore not supported by this project.

There are workarounds for home editions however, but no help is provided here

These notices here are valid for the following Windows versions:

1. Windows vista up to Windows 8.1
2. Windows server 2008 up to Windows server 2016

There is no support or help here for systems older than that.

To be able to apply rules to these systems you'll need to modify code.
At a bare minimum you should do the modifications described here

Table of Contents

• How to make use of this project on older Windows systems
  • Table of Contents
  • Initialization module
  • Project settings
  • Target platform variable
  • OS software
  • Testing

Initialization module

Edit the module named Ruleset.Initialize to allow execution for older system.

Project settings

Edit script Config\ProjectSettings.ps1 and define new variable that defines your system version,
the following variable is defined to target Windows 10.0 versions and above by default for all rules.
New-Variable -Name Platform -Option Constant -Scope Global -Value "10.0+""

For example for Windows 7, define a new variable that looks like this:
New-Variable -Name PlatformWin7 -Option Constant -Scope Global -Value "6.1"

Platform variable specifies which version of Windows the associated rule applies.
The acceptable format for this parameter is a number in the Major.Minor format.

For more information about other Windows systems and their version numbers see link below:
Operating System Version

There are other variables in Config\ProjectSettings.ps1 that are worth changing, at a minimum set Develop to $true and restart PowerShell to enable debugging features and additional requirement checks.

Target platform variable

Edit individual ruleset scripts, and take a look which rules you want or need to be loaded on target system,
then simply replace -Platform $Platform with ie. -Platform $PlatformWin7 for each rule you want.

In VS Code for example you can also simply (CTRL + F) for each script and replace all instances.
If you miss something you can delete, add or modify rules in GPO later.

Note that if you define your platform globally (ie. $Platform = "6.1") instead of making your own variable, just replacing the string, but do not exclude unrelated rules, most of the rules should work, but ie. rules for Store Apps might fail to load.

Also ie. rules for programs and services that don't exist on system will be most likely applied but redundant.

What this means, is, just edit the GPO later to refine your imports if you go that route, or alternatively revisit your edits and rerun individual scripts again.

OS software

It's hard to tell what software or module dependencies might be required for your target environment, and once you learn that you should modify version requirements in Config\ProjectSettings.ps1

For example .NET framework version 4.5 for Windows PowerShell may be required to be able to use some commandlets from modules, either those which ship with Windows or those which are part of this repository.

Testing

To save yourself some time debugging you should also run code analysis with PSScriptAnalyzer with the following rules enabled:

1. PSUseCompatibleCmdlets
2. PSUseCompatibleSyntax

Visit Test directory and run all tests individually to confirm modules and their functions work as expected, any failure should be fixed before loading rules to save yourself from frustration.

Table of Contents