I forgot to mention that I went ahead and bought the new Apple Extreme Basestation from the Apple store online. It arrived last Saturday. It was a snap to set up and I'm able to go back to letting it do DHCP for me instead of having to assign static IP addresses for all the computers. In addition, I was able to put Cdubya's iMac back on wiresless instead of directly wired via an ethernet cable. (sorry to my non-geek readers for the geek talk)
It is working flawlessly but there were a couple things that I didn't know about that made me a touch pissy. First, the 802.11n capability is only available on Mac's that have the Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The "2" is extremely important here. I have Intel Core Duo processors in both the iMac and my MacBook. Those are not supported. I didn't read that clearly enough. Could have saved myself some money there by just getting an 802.11g router.
Secondly, one of the coolest things about the new basestation is that it has a USB 2 port on it. It's designed to make a regular printer (that has a usb connection) a network printer or you can add a portable hard drive to it to make it a network drive. That's what I was really excited about. I could take the usb drive that I had connected to the iMac and move it to the basestation and get access to it from all the computers.
And it works, don't get me wrong, I could access it from everywhere quite easily (software install required for mac's and pc's to add a disk utility to mount the drive). Unfortunately there's one HUGE issue with it. For some reason, which doesn't make sense to me, streaming video from it is near impossible. At least running 802.11g anyway. Bringing a video up on my laptop or Apple TV took forever to load and even after it loaded it would pause every 30 seconds to re-buffer. I sure hope Apple gets this fixed. I ended up moving the hard drive back to the iMac and everything's working fine again. The Apple TV needs to go through the iMac's iTunes library anyway so that was no biggie. I was just hoping to be able to stream from the Macbook and pc without going through iTunes. Not a huge deal since I can still stream from the shared iTunes library. I'm planning on adding another usb drive to the basestation just to use for backups. Should be fine for that.
All in all, I'm happy with the ease of use and setup and the performance seems to be pretty good. We'll see as time goes by. I feel like I spent way too much ($180) for an 802.11g router but I feel good about taking another step towards my goal of converting my house into an Apple house (yes, I have had the kool-aid and I like it).
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4 comments:
WHEW - the geek world can now by an Apple . . .thingy, whatever it does.
. .. my eyes started to cross when I was reading and I could not follow the words without daydreaming a little!
Blogs tell a story about the exciting things that happen in the bloggers life and I have to say . . . my geek meter was REALLY going off on this one!
What can I say, I'm somewhat of a geek... not a nerd though! Just a geek.
My nerd-self was thinking along the lines of "I bet Reed Richards and that douchebag Tony Stark would understand this."
Oh, and look who's gettin' all fancy with a new template!
Forced into upgrading my template after I somehow completely hosed my original.
And yes, there's the difference between geek and nerd. I had no idea who those 2 people were until I used the google.
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