Even though Powershell is an incredibly awesome tool and powerful scripting evironment, your first encounter with it may be a bit cumbersome.

Usually when developing your first Powershell script, saving it as a file and trying to run it, this is what you will get:

<SCRIPTNAME>.ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system. For more information, see about_Execution_Policies at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135170.

Don’t panic! The error message already hints as towards a solution: we have to fiddle with execution policies to enable the execution of (unsigned) Powershell script files.

This sounds more of a big deal than it actually is.

1. Just open a new Powershell console as an administrator (Shift-Ctrl-Click the existing console in the Windows 7 taskbar or use the context menu).
2. Execute the command Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted (tab completion is your friend).
3. That’s it! Your good to run your first Powershell script.