| You have that guarantee starting with Windows 7. Version is one thing; some nice things are available only in v3+, but v2 is very usable already. I love me s

| You have that guarantee starting with Windows 7. Version is one thing; some nice things are available only in v3+, but v2 is very usable already. I love me some Powershell. Wrote my first non-trivial PS script in early 2010 that was a major component to building something I would now call "Continuous deployment of Windows OS images." But I still have way more lines of BAT in production than PS1 because the versioning is a nightmare. v2 was the first really usable release and it ran everywhere I cared about except for Windows PE. v3 got some nice enhancements and support for Windows PE, but dropped support for anything older than Windows 2008. v4 added some more but took away Windows 2008 R1. If it were just that newer versions of Powershell offered new modules and cmdlets it wouldn't be such a big deal, but the syntax itself has been evolving. This is valid in PS v3+ but not in PS v1/2: Get-Alias | ? Definition -eq Where-Object For PS v1/2 you'd have to write it as: Get-Alias | ? { $_.Definition -eq "Where-Object" } Many landmines are out there waiting if you need to write a script that can handle multiple Powershell versions. There are plenty of sucky things about BAT files... But they are truly lowest-common-denominator on any Windows system, there aren't any syntactical landmines waiting to get you with different Windows versions since 2003, and for anything you want to do on Windows that you can do with Powershell you will certainly be able to find a command-line tool that lets you do the same thing with Batch.