My old one (an original that looks like a flying saucer) had a hard time with the new shared DSL line, seizing up every time a call came through (it shares the line with a fax machine. Wouldn't be a problem if not for the spammers). I had to do a hard restart of the router to recover (unplug, replug power cable).

Finally on Saturday I restarted it, and it wouldn't come back. One too many reboots, I suppose, or just getting old.

Picked up a new AirPort Extreme, the big box. Without the fancy disk accessories, it was less than $200, which was kind of a pleasant surprise for Apple equipment.

It worked all right, but it was a bitch finding a combination of transmission and encryption settings that worked with the old IMacs here that use it over the air (my machine and my wife's are hardwired). There were a lot more options than the last time I did this, and one or two I didn't even understand. There were four different 802.11 options alone, and five encryption protocols to choose from. Mainly, it came to trial and error at the end.

It's a flat, featureless box, with a nice green light on the front to tell me all is well. I haven't tested to see if I got a range improvement--my daughter has the only laptop that uses it and can be easily hauled to the other end of the house, and she's not home right now.

So far, works like a dream.

Security is a big issue for me. I can open up one of the radio Macs here, and about seven neighborhood networks show up. Mine doesn't--there's a function to create a "closed network" that doesn't appear to routine scanners out there. They have to name it specifically to even get a shot at logging in. I can't figure out why more people aren't using this safety feature.