I’ve always wondered if the Apple Airport base stations are worth their price premium. It’s interesting I hesitate to buy in to them, since I don’t have a problem paying for Macintosh computers or iPods over Windows, Linux, or the dozens of inferior flash and hard-drive backed MP3 players out there. Perhaps it has something to do with the everyday interaction: I don’t intend to personally interact with my wireless LAN every day, I intend to set it up once and forget about it until I move to a new house.
The setup on those things is never as smooth as I expect it to be, but then, part of it is Apple’s fault. When connecting to non-Airport base stations, there’s always the question of which format to use for the keys. Do I try to type a long password in plain text? Oops, that doesn’t seem to work with non-Apple base stations. Let’s try the hex keys. Should I type it in plain? Add 0x in front? Add $ in front? It shouldn’t be this complicated.
[Update 9:52 PM] I read in the manual for the new base station that an ASCII 128-bit WEP password has 13 characters. Guess I should’ve read the user manual! After using exactly 13 characters, I was able to use ASCII passwords, which are much less painful than hex to both remember and enter.
This all came up because my SMC 7004AWBR has been increasingly flaky. Sometimes I’ll think the network is slow, and I’ll notice my SMC is out to lunch, and I’ve been browsing the Internet over my neighbor’s Linksys. I guess I’m lucky on two counts here: I have a neighbor with an open access point to use as an accidental backup link, and my SMC has lasted three years. I’ve heard of them giving up long before that. Scott’s died sometime last winter.
I went with 802.11g to be ready when someone turns the new Mac Mini in to my perfect home media server. What’s really lacking now is couch-bound browsing and control of the music library without a laptop, but I bet someone will figure that part out before too long.
The base stations live downstairs in the coat closet, and I’d always had a weak signal using a laptop upstairs in the TV room, so I found a good deal on one that included a wireless repeater, figuring I’d get rid of that problem. It turns out my house really isn’t THAT big, because the signal is fine in the TV room with just the base station. It’s good enough that the laptop won’t even bother trying to connect to the repeater.
But it’s all set up now, and I’m hoping for at least a few weeks with no home computer technology crises. Did I mention Andrea and Elizabeth spilled coffee in our keyboard, so now we have a new one?
