We've got a netgear DG834G at the moment and although the signal strength normally shows as good, it does drop in and out a lot. I know it's not ideally placed in the house but the house isn't that big or that solidly constructed. Are there any wireless routers that work better with Airport?

I've had a few netgear routers. I've used them with Apples & PCs alike. They've always been a bit iffy for me. Still, better than the D-link one I had ages ago. That was a disappointment after the excellent D-link wired router I had.

I really like the Airport Extreme. With the more recent firmware this has worked very well & has had few dropouts like the ones I experienced often with Netgear routers. It can also act as a printserver.

this might help too

Cheap Apple Store

Airport Extreme / Airport Express will do the job nicely. Assuming your Mac is a fairly recent model, it'd be worth getting something that does Draft N, or 802.11n wireless, or whatever it's called…

My Netgear works flawlessly with my Mac, PC and phone, just change the signal channel sure it'll start working fine.

How recent is recent? I'm off to gte a mac book this week and the wife's imac is a couple of years old. Think it's got the intel guts though.

Ditto what others have said. I used to have netgear and range wasn't great and it did drop out now and then. Switched to airport extreme and very happy, range is much better and doesnt drop out. With hindsight I would be tempted to go for the time capsule, which gives routing plus backup/hard drive.

Onzadog – I think Apple have been shipping 'N' wireless for almost a couple of years – take a look in System Profiler at Network->Airport and you should see what your machine has. Should be something like this:

Supported PHY Modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n

Cheers matt but I can't find anything on her machine that does that. Gives me loads of info About the Airport but doesn't mention 802.11 part of things

Double tap

Onza – try this instead… Fire up Applications/Utilities/Terminal and type the following command:

system_profiler -detailLevel full | grep 'Supported PHY'

You should then hopefully get something like this:

Supported PHY Modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n

You can ignore the odd error that you might get written out as well.

Never been impressed with my Airport Extreme.

It is upstairs and at the opposite end of the house to the computer (G5 MK1) but it's always dropping off. It is a solid old house though.

MM

I've got an old Airport Extreme and a Speedtouch 510e and it's been faultless in its 3 years.

well, after talking at length with the pro-geeks in the shop, he tlked me into a time capsule. Seems the wife thinks it might be nice to be able to remotely access her hard-drive!

Thanks for all the help.

Matt, cheers for the help. Finally found it and it does do n, so good news all round!