Airport Express

I posted this to TidBits Talk, but it fits here too…

I got my Airport Express two days ago. I used it to replace my used Airport Graphite, which I’m giving to my sister for use with her new laptop. (Plus it gave me an excuse to buy an Express for myself.)

I had a bit of a rough time with it. Starting out the telephone outlet in my bedroom was non-functional and needed a new outlet attached to it. (The Graphite was in a different room, but I wanted the Express close to my printer/stereo.)

After getting that straightened out and resetting the Express a few times. (It wasn’t playing well with the Graphite which was on but connected to nothing, additionally they were both on different channels.) I had horrible reception; My iBook 700mhz would have a full strength connection, and then without moving anything no connection at all. The fix was disabling WPA (Instead I configured it to only allow access only from my laptop), restricting it to 802.11b only, enabling interface robustness, and dropping the multicast rate down to one. I know this is a bit of overkill but it took a finicky mostly non-functional Airport Express and made it into a very stable setup. (I’ve since moved the multicast rate back to the default, two, with no loss in performance.)

I’ve really enjoyed AirTunes, but I was a bit frustrated with the lack of a volume control at first, but I looked up that command up/down arrow controls the volume. I’d been used to using the volume controls on my keyboard. (Oh, I don’t need no stinkin remote, thats my laptop…)

Printing works like a charm.

All in all its a great little box, well worth the money!

Nick Barnard

BTW: Amazon has Airport Expresses on sale for $118 and change.