i tend to use .bat since it is normally installed in whatever wintel box comes in ... i have created .bat scripts that worked just fine extracting lines from logs and checking system settings using only native windows commands ... i have also used .bat scripts with ported unix binaries (i.e., awk.exe, sed.exe, etc.) which made the scripts work much better ... you should be able to google for those ported binaries without any issues ...

good luck!