Airport Extreme Advice?

Greetings, All - New member here, learning much from reading past threads, and hoping someone with more experience than I could ease my concerns (or possibly warn me entirely off?) a wireless network change I'm planning to make in a few weeks. I'm currently connecting my new MacBook and my wife's new Dell (Vista) laptop to a Meraki wi-fi network through an Actiontec wireless router salvaged from a Verizon FIOS hardware upgrade. Everything's working fine. (So, naturally, I feel a compelling need to mess with it...).

I'm thinking of using an Airport Extreme, mainly because I like the idea of sharing a USB external drive between the laptops for photos and a huge iTunes library, and for my Time Machine backups. No need to share a printer, as the Epson we're using is already wireless.

So what do you think? I know this is a relatively simple setup, but I'm reading about lots of troubles in this forum. Is connecting the Vista box going to be a problem? Any special USB external hard drive anyone would recommend? An easier / faster / better way to do the same thing?

Many thanks in advance for your advice -

~sluggo

I would look into a NAS (network attached storage) device as the AirPort Extreme would be a more expensive/complex means toward the same end.

Something like this would be a better option, if you are otherwise happy with your network configuration:

500GB Newer Technology miniStack NAS + US... (MSNU27500G16) at OWC

I personally use a D-Link DNS-323, which has a built-in iTunes server, but that might be overkill for your needs.