Saturday, May 19, 2007

Airport Extreme -- Whoa!

Modern computing. What a blast!

I’m sitting here on our back porch listening to a “symphony” of birds and lawnmowers, enjoying the sunshine and mild temperatures of a Spring day in Western Pennsylvania. I received an Airport Extreme for Mother’s Day, as I mentioned in my previous entry. Installation was a snap.

On our previous router (not Apple brand) I had been using MAC addresses but hadn’t enabled anything more as security. I knew this wasn’t the best of ideas but we don’t appear to have an extremely active neighborhood for this type of thing -- I know, not a good excuse. I had a heck of a time figuring out what would work, some clients could log in and some couldn't and the security options were woefully out of date as the rounter has to be at least 5 years old, possibly older. Well, setting up security and getting all the clients back onto the network was extremely easy as well. It just worked. Just what I expect from Apple engineering.

So, would it really put out a stronger signal than our old “g” router. You bet’cha. We have a variety of vintages of Macs, not to mention we live in a 210 year old stone house — not stone veneer, mind you, this is whopping thick stone walls — with a nearly equal sized frame addition. Now the signal from the main wireless router, the Extreme, reaches through the entire house, into the back yard and likely across the street as well. I haven’t had the opportunity to see just how far I can go out into our acre and still be online, but I’ll be trying that in warmer drier weather to be sure.

Now I can probably just dedicate the two Airport Express routers we have to serving music to different portions of the house. Very cool indeed. Time to research speakers, I guess.

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