I have found that you *can* use PowerShell since it is installed on Windows already, but have had mixed results.

There is a cool utility called Cygwin that gives you a Linux terminal (Bash shell) on top of Windows and can have various modules added to it like CURL, which is the standard way to test and sometimes work with ElasticSearch.

Follow directions here to get and setup Cygwin:

http://bin63.com/how-to-install-elasticsearch-on-windows

http://www.cygwin.com/

Then you can test with CURL or Powershell:

Run

curl http://localhost:9200/ with Cygwin

or

Invoke-RestMethod http://localhost:9200 with PowerShell