Is my airport extreme broke?

I bought an airport extreme base station on ebay about a year ago because i was planning on getting a laptop soon. Well, i didnt end up getting one til today (a macbook). So today I tried hooking up the router to my desktop pc and the connection kept on going from 10 mbps->100mbps->to nothing.. every 5 seconds it would change. I called apple, the guy didnt even know how to hook it up.. i then called charter, my isp with little help. Im starting to think the router is junk. I tried using the airport admin utility on my macbook and the connection would flicker as well. The center light blinks slowly while the light on the right seems to blink hand in hand with the activity light on the cable modem. The only way that I can select the base station using the airport admin utility is by hooking a ethernet cable from the cable box to the lan port then a ethernet cable from the wan port to the macbook. It wont recognize it by doing it the way it says in the manual. I pretty much tried everything, am i missing something or not doing something??? thanks... steve

since you bought this used, have you done a "hard reset" to factory settings and started from scratch with the Airport Admin utility? Instructions for a hard and soft reset are here: Airport Extreme Reset Instructions

You may also want to be sure you've got the current firmware as well. Check here: Firmware

I'm using an Airport Extreme base and an Airport Express as a range extender, both with pretty good results. Set up was a bit troublesome as I came from a Linksys/Windows environment and Apple uses non-industry standard jargon in its setup routines (why, I have no idea).

Daddy Elmis said:

since you bought this used, have you done a "hard reset" to factory settings and started from scratch with the Airport Admin utility? Instructions for a hard and soft reset are here: Airport Extreme Reset Instructions

You may also want to be sure you've got the current firmware as well. Check here: Firmware

I'm using an Airport Extreme base and an Airport Express as a range extender, both with pretty good results. Set up was a bit troublesome as I came from a Linksys/Windows environment and Apple uses non-industry standard jargon in its setup routines (why, I have no idea).

Click to expand...

i believe i actually had firmware 5.7 on it (if there was such thing)

I did not know there was a soft and hard reset. I only did the, hold it down for 5 secs one like it said in the manual. I will try them both again.

I was actually using a linksys router as well, no probs what-so-ever.

I had to hard reset the Extreme a couple times during set up because I'd use an erroneous piece of data because of Apple's goofy naming convention, then couldn't be sure I had "undone" it -- so I hard reset to start fresh.