This past friday, right after I had just gotten through setting up my new blackberry, I noticed it wouldn't get onto the wifi in my home network. Curious, I walked to where I had my setup in my son's room, an old router that honestly had seen better days. There is where I found the tragic news. My router had kicked the bucket.

Panicked, I tried rebooting but to no avail. Now, the next day I was to be manning the station for one of my clients, a musical group that I do promotions for, and I needed to have my internet up and running for me to be able to do my job. Needless to say I wasn't a happy camper.

Thank goodness I had my new phone set up and working on it's 3G network, so right away I did a bit of research. Although there are many different routers under many different price points, I ended up deciding on the Airport Extreme Base Station ($179 at any Apple retail store or online).

Now, I know Apple peripherals very well, and I had every expectation that this would set up easily. However I had no idea how easy and painless a process this ended up being for me. As frazzled as I was, with two kids screaming that they couldn't get online with their PS3 and play Little Big Planet, Christmas shopping left to do, cookies baking in the oven, a live music event that I had to finish coordinating, musicians phoning me in a panic about directions and hotel reservations...well, the last thing I needed was a new gadget that needed extensive configuration. This thing worked. It just worked, right out of the box, nothing painful, nothing extensive. It just worked. I hooked it up, ran the installer that came on the included setup disk, filled in an easy set up form, restarted aiport and voilá! New home network. Maybe 15 minutes?

A small footprint was most welcome. Plus, no additional wires! Hooray! Naturally it had that gorgeous Apple goodness I was so in love with. Sigh..

The features are great. One WAN port to plug into my cable modem, three LAN ports for hard-wiring if needed (which I did, and old mac mini first gen that unfortunately did not come with airport), and a USB port - which is a wonderful addition. With this you can plug in almost any usb printer and give your whole home network wireless printing! How cool is that? How about this? Plug in a usb external hard drive so that everyone in your home network can now share files. Um, iTunes, anyone?? iPhoto? How great is it that every computer can now share the same playlists?

Best thing and something that I was sorely missing from my old router - security. This has secure lock-down so no one can piggy-back on my network anymore - or try to infiltrate my files. Gotta love it.

In the end, I got this little gadget saturday morning. Within 15 minutes of coming home with it, it was up and running, and all my machines (including the PS3 to my kids' relief) was online.

Thank you Apple. One more reason I love you. <33