networking mac and windows

Hi everyone

Sure this question has been raised before but head is spinning from information over load

I have a mac book, mac mini and a laptop using windows

Am wanting to network all three of them and use the mini as a media center fo tv and and music

So am looking to purchase an airport extreme base station and an external hard drive. All my music and films etc i would put on to the external hard drive then all three computers could sync with this.

What i have questions about is

1. Will the above work and will windows work with mac
2. I have read about different formats of hard drive ms dos and fat 32 what does it mean and what format will i need
3 Can any one recommend an external hard drive easy to use 1 - 2tb

Thanks for all your help and any other tips i would be very grateful

cheers

James

1) Yes, it should be pretty easy to network all of these devices. I can easily access my parent's computer and external hard drive wirelessly through my MBP.

2) FAT32 is a format that will allow both Mac and PC to read/write. However, this format will only be able to handle single files to be less than 4Gb. So if you do have movies on there as a single file then I would probably not recommend this format. NTFS is the file format for Windows to which it can also read/write. Your Mac will only be able to READ from this type of format. HFS+ is the file format native to Mac computers. If you format the drive to this, your Mac will be able to read/write, however Windows will not. I would recommend using NTFS and getting other software on your Mac that will allow it to write to it. Here is something really quickly that I pulled from Google:

Lifehacker - Read/write to NTFS drives on your Mac - File Transfer

3) My parents use a 1TB Western Digital. I believe it's a part of the MyBook series or something like that. You can check them out on their website. I do know that my parent's drive can use an Ethernet cable to connect to the router, which makes it EASY to network and share out among other computers.

Good luck!