airport express vs. airport extreme

[recstar24]

Through the generous kindness of Nate and all his wonderful Nateness, I was able to receive a nice linksys wr54g (I think, its the one that cannot take the DD-WRT firmware) as I was having router issues. It has worked pretty well, but the one thing I notice is that when multiple things are accessing the router at the same time, it tends to drop out. For example, I had my ipad, and two laptops were exchanging music through itunes as my work tablet will be returned, and it would suddenly drop out of connection, and wouldn't connect back to the router until a couple of minutes. I upgraded to the recent firmware but nothing really. Also, some of you may know that the ipad has some reported issues with wifi, and every once in a while it will kick me out and ask me to sign back on the wifi, which may also be router related too.

A lot of you have had many good things to say about the airports, and I am thinking it might be nice to have a really nice stable router that won't drop out on me or require hard resets often. I have a HP wireless printer and would love to be able to access my external hard drive that I have. Thanks.

EDIT: I believe my current laptop (s) are G band, the ipad I believe is only g band as well.

Edited May 25, 2010 by recstar24

[n_maher]

That's odd Ryan, I never had dropout issues with that router and it wasn't uncommon to have 3 or 4 wireless devices all accessing it at the same (two laptops, a netbook music server and my SB3). I wonder if this is the iPad specific wireless issue that cropped up and if you need to set the router to run on a specific band (G only?)? But I'm way out of my depth here...

[recstar24]

Great points Nate - it could really be the ipad causing problems. I have read the apple support forum, and I went ahead and changed the router options to run only on G. Also, I might just want to wait a bit to see if things got better, as I started messing around with the router once my ipad and laptops started being weird. I think the last time I noticed it dropped out on my was maybe 2 days ago? I would say overall its a minor issue and nothing more than a nuisance, so spending $$$ on an airport might not be the most frugal of decisions currently.