Which wireless device should I buy?

[pkiula]

Hi,

I have bought an iMac 24 inch and a Macbook Pro 17 inch for myself and my spouse respectively. We have been using office Windows laptops thus far at home too, sharing out internet connection through the usual linksys, which is about 4 years old.

Now I would like to upgrade my wireless, and I recognized that Apple has its own wireless routers so I dont need to get dlink or linksys. But I am confused about which one I should go for.

Here is what I need to do:

1. Play my itunes wirelessly from my room to my living room's home theatre system. Airport website suggests this is possible. I would like to set up the itunes on both my macs to be able to beam music to my living room, separately. (No need to share the itunes library and all that complex jazz.)

2. Do what the old linksys did-- take the internet broadband connection and make it wireless for access through 6 devices, including 2 mobile smartphones, 2 windows laptops, and 2 macs.

3. Print to one central Canon MP800 printer from all the 4 machines, 2 windows and 2 macs.

4. Of course, it may be great if a wireless machine did the above and also became a backup mechanism (time capsule). But this is not a must, only a nice to have.

Is my current understanding correct:

- If I want 1 to 3, then Airport Extreme should do the job.
- If I want 1 to 4, then Time Capsule will do it.

I am doubtful if I understand Time Capsule correctly. Would it serve as a backup AND a wireless device that does 1 to 3? Then it may be worth the money.

Thanks!

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

Ok here's what you would need to do.

The time capsule will not be able to do 1 without help from another apple device. It will take care of your printer, wireless Internet, and backups but it won't allow you to stream music to your stereo system. To do this you would need an Airport Express (the only device that will do this for you) setup as a wireless bridge in the room where the stereo is.

You could do items 1-3 with just the Airport Express buy you would have to have your cable modem setup in the room with the stereo and possibly the printer. You could setup the printer as a shared printer on either Mac and that would eliminate the need for the printer to be close to your stereo.

I hope this helps. Good luck.

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

Forgot to mention that the AppleTV will allow you to stream music from your computer to your stereo as well. It is quite a bit more expensive than the Airport Express.

 

[pkiula]

Thanks!

So if I buy Airport Express (and do the time capsule stuff with my own hard disk), my questions:

1. Is Airport Express much slower than Airport Extreme? The user reviews on mac website seem to suggest so.

2. I don't mind having Airport Express with my surround sound system. That is where the linksys is at the moment, as I have a cable broadband package anyway. But how difficult would it be to setup the printer as a "shared printer" on a Mac, and when done this way, will it also be a printer for the Windows laptops? Both Windows laptops are fairly new Vaios with decent wireless cards, but I am not sure how interoperable Airport Express is.

Thanks!