I’m thinking of buying an Airport Extreme Base Station

I’m thinking of buying an Airport Extreme Base Station:

Apple - AirPort Extreme - Simultaneous dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi base station

I have been through a few wireless routers in the last few years. It has been frustrating to have them go down and need restarting periodically.

I have a 3,000 square foot house and a recording studio out back. There are 3 renters and me in my house using 7 windows computers, 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, 1 Macbook, 1 Andriod phone, a Kindle, and a Playstation 3 all using the wireless network at any given time and I am finding that it may be a bit much for your run-of-the-mill Netgear or Lynksys routers purchased on eBay over the years.

I have actually found a website where one can wipe the software from these devices and install something else to turn them into signal boosters. I may play around with that later because I have a gaggle of them lying around, not necessarily dead but just didn’t satisfy for reliability.

Even though I love my home-built Windows gaming boxes, I also love my Apple products. They seem to do everything right and are made with the best quality. I am expecting this wireless router to be an answer to an irritating problem I have been dealing with for a few years and I am also enamored with the USB plug for an external hard-drive (has anyone else come up with something that cool?).

Any Apple veterans have thoughts on the use of this product in my situation?

Sometimes, routers need to be bounced... Fact of life for consumer equipment.

I have an APEx running my network. My house (not one-upping) is 3800 sq ft and 2 stories. I have full signal throughout the house with the APEx sitting in a central area. My office happens to be in the middle of the house. I have between 9 and 12 devices accessing it at any given time.

I have my Time Machine hard drive hooked up to the APEx and it is working flawlessly. It was as easy to set up there as it was to set up directly on my machine. I have a NAS device set up through the Ethernet ports and even run FTP for outside access (secured) for it.

Tip on the router - take some time to get to know each screen and the settings that go with it. Read everything. I have mine very customized and some of the services I run in house require "static" IPs. I dont set up static IPs but I do run DHCP reservations based on MAC address. Also, once you get it up and working as you want it without any issues, save the config file somewhere. If ever you have to do a restore, you can point to that config file and have the thing back up and running within minutes.

Wow, so you get full signal throughout? I have my router on my desk upstairs in my office but the guys downstairs complain that their signal gets really weak sometimes.

The two computers at my desk are wired and they never go down but the wireless does. This has happened with multiple routers of different brands. I have to admit, I don't know anything about the settings. I just expect to plug it in and have it work as advertised.

I am assuming APEx means airport extreme...

Can you recommend a website that explains the deferent settings in American?