Airport Express the best router?

Airport Extreme the best router?

***My main question I am asking is is this worth the money, or should we save some money and just get a LInksys Router??****

I'm a noob, so sorry if this is a stupid question.

We have a 4 year old Linksys router. It needs to be replaced.

DH just bought a Aiport Extreme and wanted me to make sure this is the best option for us before we open it.

Not sure what specs you need...

- New macbook pro (primary user, and will be used A LOT)
- iTouch
- 4 or 5 year old G5 iMac
- potentially 2 iPhones in the future
- need to be able to print on a printer hooked up to the PC in the basement (this is a huge issue for me since we always have 'spooling' errors, maybe because it's my mac trying to print through a PC???)


Hooking it up to a PC running on XP. The PC is about 9 years old, but has had some upgrades.

We have Standard High Speed Online (up to 10 Mbps)

Depends - what Linksys router are you talking about? Don't forget to compare Apples to Apples (pardon the pun)
With the Extreme you get a USB to ethernet converter(which can be used for hard drives or printers), 3 Gigabit ports, and dual radio Wifi with Wireless N.
So you could hook up your printer to the Extreme instead of printer sharing over a PC. Or you could add an Express and put the printer anywhere.

I run a time capsule everything is pretty much the same as an Extreme except it has an internal hard drive. Works fine and I have similar hardware.
2 iPod touches
1 New Macbook Pro
1 Macbook Air
1 Mac Mini G4
1 iPhone
3 Dell laptops
1 Self Built PC (Used to run XP now running 7)

Works great and I have bought 3 Airport Expresses and Airfoil so I can play music anywhere in the house.

I just ran a speed test and got 28Mbps down and 8.10Mbps up so it should handle your 10Mbps no problem.

One issue is the USB disk may or may not work for Time Machine backup. I got it to work for a time for a friend - but then it just stopped working. Seems to be a pretty common issue for Airport Extremes - so if you want to do network backup using time machine you may want to consider a time capsule instead.

My advice is to decide on what your back up plan is going to be, then weigh up the Extreme versus the Time Capsule. Certainly with multiple Apple units using the wireless LAN, Apple is simpler to setup but a Linksys modem/router/wireless can do the trick. Don't forget the Extreme still needs to be hooked to a modem of some sort.