The Airport Extreme Base Station, pictured above, arrived on Tuesday and was a breeze to setup after installing the Airport Utility program from the enclosed CD. My prior setup had a D-Link 802.11b+ router sharing my internet access between my Mac Pro, my wife's iMacG5 and a Mac Mini G4. The Mac Pro and the iMac were wired to the router while the Mini received it's signal wirelessly. This being said, I was fearful that I would not see a significant speed boost in the wired MACs and thought I might just have bought this for the sole purpose of connecting to the Apple TV when it arrives. I was very excited to see that first web page came up quicker than I had ever seen since switching to a MAC, 2 years ago. I'm not sure why, but this router does a much better job sending the signal out through the ethernet jacks than the D-Link does.
The D-Link was originally setup with a Windows PC about 5 or 6 years ago and when I switched to MAC I never installed any software to configure it for the MAC. Maybe that was the problem? I'm not sure, but WOW, what a difference. At this time, my wife's iMAC is receiving a wireless signal and her internet speed is significantly faster than when she was wired to the D-Link directly. In the past, I noticed when I had to troubleshoot my internet connection and plugged the cable modem directly into the Mac Pro, the speed increased. Basically the D-Link was just not parsing out the signal effectively and the new Airport Extreme Base Station works beautifully. Of course, the wireless signal going to the Mac Mini one floor up, has shown significant improvements as well.
Another great feature is that we no longer have to worry about my wife's iMAC being awake for someone else on the network to print, since I have the HP Photosmart 850 plugged into the Airport Extreme's USB slot. I have not tried to print from my work laptop, which is running Windows 2000, but all the MACs print to it just fine. I believe it was $179 well spent and has improved the speed of our network tremendously.
0 comments:
Post a Comment