Airport Extreme

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.

Here I am – first blog post on the new wireless network. Simultaneous dual band speeeeeed.

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:

Old Airport photo courtesy me-pawel
New Airport photo courtesy of Bj