What a difference a new router makes.

I’ve been using the old Apple Airport extreme, 2nd generation, for about 8 years now. It’s been rock solid, and provided wireless access almost 24×7 for the whole 8 years.

Lately, things have been getting flakey. Trying to control my Mac Mini Boxee on the TV was laggy – and remoting to other desktops flaky. So today, I purchased an upgrade.

I was looking at the Cisco/Linksys offerings as I use a few at work, but when using a NAS device I would have had to reformat my existing HFS+ drives. I compared the Linksys E3000 model with the new Airport Extreme, and for $50 more, it seemed the Airport just fitted right in to my mac network. Well of course it would, Apples for Apples. The last thing to convince me was the 4.5 out of 5 star rating for the Airport extreme on the Apple Store – and a review from SmallNetBuilder.

It was simple to setup. Plugin, configure with the Apple Airport Utility (the CD has both Mac and PC versions included) and then I plugged in my Hard Drive. It gets shared, and used across all the Macs.

Check out the speed differences, before and after:

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  <img decoding="async" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/1025904727.png" alt="After" />
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