A few days ago I broke down and bought Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, and the new Airport Extreme 802.11n base station. I’ve been thinking about upgrading for several months but reports of problems experienced by other users who upgraded, scared me into sitting on the sidelines. I have been fortunate in that I experienced no problems doing the upgrade. Indeed, my Mac Book Pro (purchased in June 2007) is running all applications, especially Mail, much faster. What I like most about Leopard is the Quick Look feature which allows me to see what’s inside a file (document, video, slides) without having to open an application.

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Faster wireless networking with 802.11n

Because I am in the center of Amsterdam where a lot of people have wireless networks, there’s a lot of interference which noticeably slowed down my network. Hence, I set the Airport Extreme 802.11n base station to use 5 GHz, instead of 2.4 GHz. Since my Mac Book Pro has 802.11n built in, no problem sending and receiving over 5 GHz. Moving files around the network is so much faster! Of course, all the other computers in the house are still on 802.11b or g, so I hooked up the old Airport base station to provide them with wireless access.

Setting up the base station and the network were very easy using Glenn Fleishman’s excellent guide, Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Extreme Network.

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