Getting Access to the Microsoft PowerShell Gallery in Windows 7

Over the past three years, I have not had a need to use the Microsoft PowerShell Gallery on the Windows 7 machines. While working on the Spectre/Meltdown issue, it finally hit me that I needed to use it on the Windows 7 machines. It was kind of hard to find clear and concise instructions on installing it on those machines. Windows 10 is a breeze, but there were extra steps. Luckily, all of the Windows 7 machines already met the required criteria. The following are the requirements and steps you need to take to use the PowerShell Gallery on Windows 7 machines.

Requirements:

• Windows .Net Framework 4.5 or later
• PowerShell 3.0 or later

Once you have these requirements met, here are the steps to gaining access to the PowerShell Gallery in operating systems earlier than Windows 10:

• Download the PackageManagement_x64.msi and/or PackageManagement_x86.msi from the Microsoft Download Center. Place the x86 and x64 versions in the same directory as the PowerShell script. 
• Deploy the appropriate PackageManagement version to each machine
• Now that Install-PackageProvider cmdlet is available, execute the following Install-PackageProvider nuget -force -verbose

You will now have access to the PowerShell Gallery using the install-module cmdlet. 

The script for installing and configuring the system to access the gallery is located on my GitHub site.