Airport Express range poor?

[Pretty Great]

So apparently the Airport Express has fairly good wireless range, and in my room, I could only just barely get on my home network with one bar of signal.

So, I got an Airport Express to replace my 6 year old router.

The range on it is exactly the same, if not worse. Is this normal? Or is there a setting I've missed.

-Connecting to it from a new MacBook.-

[waw74]

what "radio mode" are you using, 5GHz is notoriously bad when going through walls, try the 2.4 signal and see if that improves your range.