I am sure if you have been working with ArcGIS 9.3.1, 10 and running this on Microsoft Windows Vista, 7 you would have come across issues when using help! When you start ArcMap or ArcCatalog, pressing F1 launches the ArcGIS Help Library. This is a useful library to navigate through to find information. Currently this works on Microsoft Windows Vista, 7. Pressing F1 after ArcMap or ArcCatalog has been started also displays this dialog window. This is standard Microsoft Windows Vista, 7 dialog indicating that the help was created in Windows Help Format. This is an older format which is not installed...

One of the new slick features of Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is the ability to handle VHD’s. You can use them for a number of different tasks including archiving files and folders through to booting up another operating system. While Windows 7 supports VHD’s, they aren’t as easy to work with as uou have to use Disk Management via the administration tools to mount and unmount VHD’s. This can become rather painful if you are wanting to work with many of them and do this often. There is a neat little tool called VHD Attach which speeds up this process, allowing you to...

  Since the release of Microsoft Windows 7, many users have been asking if ArcGIS Explorer 900 is supported on the latest and greatest operating system. Late last week the system requirements for ArcGIS Explorer 900 was updated to support Windows 7. The latest list of supported operating systems is as follows:   The updated system requirements for ArcGIS Explorer 900 can be found here: http://wikis.esri.com/wiki/…  Also remember that you can check if your machine can run ArcGIS Explorer 900 by running an automated tool. Information on this can be found here:...

This is something interesting I came across this evening. I decided to remove ArcGIS 9.3.1 from my laptop as I was going to install ArcGIS 9.4. This was the first time I was uninstalling ArcGIS 9.3.1 from Windows 7 so I wondered if there were going to be any problems. Interestingly enough, as I was following through the uninstall wizard I came across an prompt.   After the uninstall had validated, it throw a file in use prompt. At the time, I thought that I maybe had previous setup that hadn’t completed properly so I decided to reboot. After a reboot I got the same message. I decided to...

Earlier this week I decided install ArcGIS 9.3.1 on my HP Mini 5101 Netbook. My netbook is running Microsoft Windows 7 and I have to say the performance has been awesome so far. Things were working very well and yesterday afternoon I installed ArcGIS Server 9.3.1. I can just imagine what you are thinking. Why am I installing ArcGIS 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 on a netbook? Well I am off to Redlands today and I didn’t want to lug around my powerful laptop. I needed something small that works. Funnily enough, ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 runs really well on this netbook. Now that I had ArcGIS 9.3.1 and...

With Microsoft Windows 7 set to be launched on October 22nd, many users have been asking about ArcGIS support. Well some great news today is that ArcGIS 9.3.1 is now supported on Windows 7. We are pleased to announce that the following ESRI products and versions are now supported on the Microsoft Windows 7 Operating System: ArcGIS Desktop 9.3 and 9.3.1 ArcReader 9.3 and 9.3.1 ArcINFO Workstation 9.3 and 9.3.1 ArcGIS Engine 9.3 and 9.3.1 I have been using Windows 7 since the beta release, then onto release candidate and now final and I have yet to find any showstoppers when running...

Now that Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 have been released, a few users have been wondering about installation issues on these platforms. To date, I have yet to find any. Over the last few weeks I have installed ArcGIS 9.3.1, ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 on numerous Windows 7 laptops as well as servers running Windows Server 2008 R2. This includes Windows Server 2008 R2 running under Hyper-V Core as well. I have found that many users do not follow the pre-requisite installation instructions before installing ArcGIS Server 9.3.1. If you are going to install ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 on...

It’s finally available to the masses! Microsoft Windows 7 is now available for download to MSDN and TechNet users. Windows 7 was released to manufacturing about two weeks ago. Information about this can be found here: http://geo.geek.nz/microsoft/… As you can imagine, Microsoft servers are being hammered right now with the demand of Windows 7. This morning I grabbed Windows 7 Enterprise x86 and x64 versions. I have been running Windows 7 Release Candidate for months now and things have been going very well. I am still using Windows 7 Release Candidate as my primary operating system on my...

I have been looking forward to this news for a few days now and it’s now official. This morning Microsoft announced that Windows 7 has RTM’d. RTM officially happens only after sign-off occurs. What happens is a build gets designated as a RTM contender after going through significant testing and meeting our quality bar for RTM. Then, it goes though all the validation checks required for RTM including having all languages of that build completed. If all the validation checks have passed – sign-off for RTM can occur. Today after all the validation checks were met, we signed off and declared build...

Over the weekend I updated my laptop to Microsoft Windows 7. I was previously running Microsoft Windows Vista SP2. After a short while I had most of my environment up and running again. It was a great time to install Windows 7 as ArcGIS 9.3.1 had arrived and I tend to rebuild my machine whenever a new version comes out. Installing ArcGIS 9.3 on Windows 7, I had some initial installation problems but eventually got things to work. I wrote up about these here: http://mandown.co.nz/esri/… Installing ArcGIS 9.3.1 on Windows 7 and everything went very well. No problems with the installation. Within a...