So you may or may not have seen the post on moving over to pledge allegiance to Apple heart and soul, but ths is the first post in a series in the swapout of most of my tech over to the Apple brand. Simply put, I’m dog-tired of the issues that I’ve been experiencing as PCs and mobile devices have been failing to perform as I expect.
I definitely have high standards, but that doesn’t mean tech shouldn’t live up to them – be it in-situ in the home/office, or on the move. So I am going to defect over to Apple’s offerings – let’s see how the ride goes. First to get rolled out is the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless access point, to be followed by iPhone, MacBook Pro, and then Apple TV (when they update it – more on that in another post).
I installed the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless access point on Friday evening, under the assumption it would be easy… boy was I wrong. Now, before I continue, I should say the issues I experienced were with a Windows PC, but still, the installation process took HOURS.
You might be thinking “but I thought Apple stuff was installed in 10 or so minutes” – yep, as I thought too, from reading reviews on IT sites – but it wasn’t to be. The issue that transpired was that the Airport Utility (some access point configuration software installed on your PC before you turn on the Airport Extreme), once installed, needed a PC reboot to get it to play nice with the Airport Extreme!! Before the reboot, the utility just said “error -6753”, which wasn’t helpful in the slightest. Even googling this with other keywords didn’t give hits on how to solve the problem, until after 20 mins.
Suffice to say the PC has to be rebooted once you’ve plugged in the Airport Extreme to the mains – who knows why – but after that I’ve got to say the installation went without a hitch. Most of the settings (which I configured manually, by choice) were done in 2 mins, and we were up with wireless within 20 mins.
So what does this tell me? Well, for starters, Apple could improve their error handling in their utilities (I thought we left the days of “error codes” 10 years ago!), but mainly, you should use Apple computers to configure an Apple network – PCs just caused me more issues like the ones I was trying to avoid.
Now things are up and running, stage 1 of rocketship Apple launch is complete…. T-3 days until the iPhone arrives 🙂
Ben