Niall Doherty » Blog

So I finally found time to add a much-requested feature to Coda-Slider: Different classes for each tab. Now you can target individual tabs and give each one a different look. In the new demo, you’ll see that I just used different background colors to illustrate this feature, but of course you can use images if you like.

As this is just a minor addition, I’m calling the updated version “Coda-Slider 1.1.1″. Makes sense to me.

• Check out the demo
• Download Coda-Slider 1.1.1

Apologies again that I haven’t been able to respond to all your comments and emails regarding Coda-Slider. I hope you understand that it’s just something I put together for fun and experience, and it’s difficult to spend time maintaining it when I have paying jobs on offer.

Also, please keep sending me your own implementations of Coda-Slider. I will get a showcase together eventually, promise.

Yesterday I decided to help a friend setup a secure wireless connection on her newish Compaq Presario F500 notebook. She only has it a few months, and it came with Windows Vista. I’m still running Windows XP myself (although the Mac conversion is looming, trust me), and I haven’t had much dealings with Vista. From what I had seen and heard of Microsoft’s latest OS, I wasn’t overly impressed.

Anyway, I setup the wireless connection using the WEP key I’d gotten from my friend’s Netgear router, going about it the same way I would on Windows XP. The process is almost automatic for me since I’d talked people through it literally hundreds of times as an AOL technical support agent a couple of years ago. Everything seemed to be in the same place and I did what I usually do, but the wireless just wouldn’t hook up. It was about then that my friend noted that the machine had been running a bit slower than usual lately. Fine, I’d just untick a few things that looked unnecessary in msconfig (start > run > msconfig > startup tab) and reboot. Maybe that would get the wireless working, too.

Big mistake.

Turns out you can’t just go disabling stuff willy-nilly in msconfig on Vista. With XP you can disable everything in that list and carry on with your wonderful life, but Vista sees fit to go apeshit when you try the same. So, upon reboot, I was greeted with a bunch of “application service” errors, none of Microsoft’s Apple-cloned Vista eye candy (just a bland, Windows ME looking interface), and a very worried friend who no longer seemed so confident in my computer literacy.

Oops.

Nothing would really work either. Nothing in device manager, nothing in network connections, USB ports were lifeless. What the hell had I done?

After a few searches on my own PC this morning, I found some answers. First, from BlackViper.com:

Do not use “msconfig” to disable services, type “services.msc” in the Run box instead!

Wish I knew that earlier.

Next, I used this list from TweakHound.com to reset all Vista’s services back to their default settings. (Took a while, too. It would have been nice if Microsoft had put a nice big “Reset all to default” button in there.) I did come across a few things that don’t appear in that TweakHound list, but I just left most of those disabled or set them to manual. Use your own judgement if you happen upon this same adventure.

A reboot later and everything was glossy and see-through again. Back to where I started. Now to figure out what’s up with that wireless connection.