I need to configure few Windows 7 machines (with a wide variety of tasks - from setting up screensaver, disabling services, adding task schedule entries to setting up IPsec/firewall rules).
Since it's going to be a few machines, it makes much more sense to do automate it instead of doing everything by hand.
Ideally, I would like to end with two files: one with script and the other one being f.e. xml holding variables for particular settings.
My question is - Which scripting environment will be best suited for the task?
I haven't done any serious Windows scripting in past, so this is essentially a question "Which scripting environment I should learn?"