What made me go for the Apple product was the recent purchase of a used PowerBook G4, I try connecting to my D-Link router and I was often loosing connection, which made me very angry. I disconnected the D-Link, which had wireless “G” and four Ethernet jacks to went totally wireless, this has an impact on my Mac mini because up to today it was always connected via Ethernet.

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So the main difference is just the speed, my Mac mini was getting great download speeds on some networks and I notice that this has decrease about 40% since I moved to wireless. This got me thinking, how fast is fast enough? My cable service advertise my plan as 7Mbps, that’s only the download speeds, my upload speed is about 300k/bs.

This changes when you are using only wireless, I recently ran a speed test using speedtest.net and it reported download speed of 11354k/bs and uploads of 465k/bs. I’m no expert so I don’t quite understand what this numbers mean, is 11354k/bs the same as 11Mbps or 1.1Mbps, or even worse .11Mbps. I wont even mention my upload speeds because they seem quite low, provided I don’t upload much to the web.

That is just talking about numbers, my experience in the other hand hasn’t really change that much, I do a lot of research on the web, and most pages load pretty fast. I get my podcasts via iTunes download, and they seem a bit slower than before but not really to the point that becomes a problem. I would like to know exactly what I’m loosing by using wireless as oppose to Ethernet, my D-Link was a 10/100 Ethernet which I’m note sure what it means also and well the speed ultimately depends on the source.

The way I understand it is, if the source is transmitting at 10k/bs, then that’s all you are going to get. So how fast is fast enough for you? Do you use Ethernet only, Wireless only, or a combination of both. If you have tips or tricks to improve download and upload speeds, let me know to share it with my web community.

Also, if you know of a good software to measure the uploads/downloads speeds of my provider, email me at lmenendez7@gmal.com to share it with the community as well. Find my contact information on my Find Me At tab or use my forum page. Thanks for reading.

While it didn’t die I purchase a used PowerBook G4 and I was having issues connecting, sometimes losing the signal after being connected for awhile. That was enough to make me go out and get one of those new Airport Express, and it works like magic. I had a small hiccup when I first connected because I told the setting to connect to the existing network, which was already disconnected (my D-Link.) I had to reset the Airport Express delete the connection profile from my Mac mini and create a new one for the Airport Express.

Ever since its been working fine, no drop connection on my PowerBook G4, reliable connections on both my iPhone and my wife’s iPhone and my Mac mini is running using the internal 802.11g antenna. The four devices work great but what impressed me the most was the ease of configuring one of my printers to work with the Airport Express.

I have two printers, one is a Canon MX-310 which I got when I purchase my Mac mini on September and a Brother HL-2040 that I bought over a year ego. I connected the Brother printer to share it on my wireless connection and its working great too, my excuse to do this as opposed to have it connected directly onto the Mac mini is so that my PowerBook G4 can print even if the Mac mini is off. Using printer sharing options, I was able to share the Canon printer but only when the Mac mini is on.

I already made some changes on my Airport Express unit, I set the DNS addresses to point to OpenDNS, which is a must for me. I set up my encryption scheme to use WPA with a HEX key (personal preference,) and changed my SSID to something that identifies the unit less to prevent curious people to try to hack my router just because is a Mac router (you know, haters.)

At $99, I think the Airport Express is a great router, while most people see it as an extension to a network I think it performs wonderfully as a single router. As an added bonus, this router is using 802.11n which will be good in the future as I transition to new machines. If you are having issues with your Airport Express or you just love yours, leave a comment on this post, share your experience with the community. Thanks for reading.