There are many reviews of Apple's Airport Extreme on the Web but most contradict each other by presenting wildly different throughput results or otherwise don't make a whole lot of sense. So I decided to have my own look at the "Early 2009" Airport Extreme by conducting a few simple tests. This edition of this router, switch and wireless-access-point combination simultaneously supports the 2.4 and 5 GHz wireless bands. The firmware version is given as 7.5.1 and is said to support the finalised wireless-N standard.

One review I read claimed that the WAN port performed poorly. To overcome this problem the reviewers simply switched to one of the other Ethernet ports on the unit. This concerned me as I had planned on using the WAN port, but with NAT (network address translation) turned off. I guessed that the slow-down experienced by the reviewers was due to the overhead of NAT and SPI (stateful packet inspection) and had nothing to do with the physical port itself. I was hoping that rather than by switching ports, the reviewers could have achieved the same result by simply turning off NAT.

To test I used two Core 2 Duo Macs with 5400 RPM 2.5" drives. One was running the built-in FTP server, and the other the FTP command in the terminal. Not high-end equipment by any means but this is what I will be using day-to-day with the Airport Extreme. Since I was only interested in sustained throughput, I conducted the test with a single 349 MiB file. Each test was conducted three times, and then the average was taken.

It can be seen that the WAN port behaves as any other port when NAT is turned off (lucky for me as this is how I use the unit). The overhead of NAT is considerable and cuts the Ethernet transfer rate down by 52%. This should not be a problem however as long as your connection to the Internet is less than 177 Mbps. Mine is currently at 17 Mbps—in home situations the Airport Extreme should suffice for some time to come.

Wireless throughput is the limiting factor in the second set of tests. The added overhead of NAT only sees a 7% drop in wireless performance. Similarly to the wired situation this should not be a problem unless you're using wireless with an Internet connection of 117 Mbps or greater.

It should be noted that the distance between the base station and the client was less than 1 m, and that the spectrum in the densely populated area of the tests was quite noisy.

I am very impressed with the wireless speed. Previously I was using wireless-G with a throughput of around 14 Mbps. My new Airport Extreme sees a nearly 10 times increase in performance! I'm amazed every time I think about it.

Of course all of the above results change as soon as there are a number of clients trying to simultaneously connect to the Internet, but this situation lies outside of the bounds of the above testing procedure (and outside the bounds of my immediate interest).

There are only two things that annoy me about Apple's Airport series. Firstly there is a lack of configurability compared to that of other units (telnetting into a Billion unit for example reveals a dizzying number of settings). And secondly the lack of a Web interface limits configuration to Windows and Macintosh clients running the Airport configuration utility. Neither gripe is surprising however considering that this product is from Apple.

All-in-all I'm very pleased with the performance of the Early 2009 Airport Extreme. The WAN port performs just as well as a LAN port with NAT turned off, and the Wireless Performance is fantastic—addressing my areas of concern.

I'll never forget being intrigued by the first Mac I ever saw.

I spent my childhood tinkering with Commodore 64's, Amstrad CPC 464's and the occasional Amiga. I was first introduced to IBM compatibles in 1986 and they consumed my life for the next two years. Then in 1988 my family moved to a small town in country New South Wales, Australia, where I was upset to find there were no IBM clones at my new school! Instead there were these tiny computers labelled "Macintosh Plus". I was surprised to see that every one of these computers had a mouse—previously the presence of a mouse had been a novelty for me. I curiously switched it on and played with the mouse while the screen displayed a flashing question mark on top of a disk. An older kid gave me a disk, it was a little 3.5" disk not like the larger 5.25" 'floppy' disks I was used to (I think it was System 3). It booted and within the next two minutes I was convinced that this was the coolest thing I had ever seen. After that moment, if anybody ever asked me about Macs, I'd say,

Nowadays there's not a great deal of difference between the various platforms, not enough at least to make a noise about like the Mac in the eighties.

The multi-platform Mini vMac emulates a Mac Plus with the use of a ROM that you extract from your old Mac Plus using a program called CopyRoms. Once the ROM has been extracted the resulting file must be named "vMac.ROM" and placed into the same directory as the Mini vMac program. Disks are then inserted into the emulated Mac Plus by dragging-and-dropping disk image files onto the Mini vMac icon or application window (of course the emulated machine won't boot unless the disk image contains an installed system).

It really is incredible how well the emulator works. A nice touch is how the mouse cursor moves seamlessly in and out of the emulator. You'll need to use [Ctrl][M] to magnify the display, and [Ctrl][F] to enter what's called "full screen" in order to trap the mouse cursor when playing games. My only criticism is that compared to my old Macintosh the emulator seems to have a little too much power.

There's no longer the need to save pocket money in order to buy expensive floppies; an archive called Blanks contains a number of blank disk images of varying sizes that are of course infinitely reproducible. (The floppy drive of the Mac Plus is not emulated allowing disk images of arbitrary sizes to be used, subject only to file system constraints.)

The best operating system for the Mac Plus is System 6 and luckily Apple has released this OS as freeware. Boot the emulator using the first of two disks called Z-6.0.8-System Startup. Next drag an appropriately sized blank disk image onto the Mini vMac window and begin the system installation. If needed mount the second System 6 disk image called Z-6.0.8-System_Additions and copy any of the needed extras.

I was lucky enough that I was able to clone the external 40 MB hard drive from my old Mac using my SCSI equipped Powerbook. The resulting disk image works perfectly with Mini vMac. Using this image with the emulator feels just like I'm using my old computer.

There are two applications available to get files in and out of the emulated environment. To export a file, run ExportFl from within the emulator, then press [Cmd][O] and select the file. A save-file dialogue box will then appear in the host operating system. To import a file, run ImportFl from within the emulator, and then drag a file onto the Mini vMac icon or application window. A save-file dialogue box will then appear in the emulated environment. It is important to realise that resource forks are not preserved in either direction. The file type and creator codes can be corrected within the emulator by using ResEdit and selecting "Get Info" from the "File" menu. Within Mac OS X the same is achieved by using the Finder and selecting "Get Info" from the "File" menu and adjusting the option "Open with".

If you have lost software due to the failure of an aged floppy disk you'll most likely be able to replace it at the Macintosh Garden. This site is dedicated to preserving software titles that have been abandoned by their rights holders.

Note that you'll need a stripped down system disk in order play most games (such as Beyond Dark Castle). Using a typical System 6 install will cause many games to fail at launch, giving an error message about a large OS occupying memory. I always booted my old Mac from a floppy when playing games, and from the hard drive when doing anything else—I use the emulator in the same way.

Lastly, for those who are fussy about the icons that appear in Mac OS X there are some high resolution icons for Mini vMac and its associated files available on the Mini vMac website.

 

I recently had an intermittent problem where my PC would fail to power-up. The only signs of activity were the spinning of the PSU fan and a solid HDD activity LED.

Since the PSU fan was spinning I assumed it was the motherboard at fault. Replacing a motherboard is a slippery slope that usually ends in the expensive trinity of replacing the RAM and CPU as well as the motherboard. Wishing for anything else to be at fault, I searched the Web for people experiencing the same problem.

Nearly everyone was blaming the power supply.

The power supply is the butler of PC murder—always seen as the most likely suspect, but rarely at fault. I even knew a guy who blamed his power supply for a problem that was ultimately caused by his firewall!

I didn't think the PSU guilty until I read a post by a guy who went through three motherboards before finding out it was the power supply. It is much easier and cheaper to replace the PSU, so I decided to try replacing it first.

Well what do you know? The butler did do it! The computer has been working fine ever since.

The PSU I replaced was the most expensive one I've ever bought—with fancy cabling, heatpipes and PFC. It was also the most short-lived at 18 months of age. Which goes to show that there isn't always a correlation between cost and reliability.

If your photos fail to appear in SkyDrive it's because you've done the right thing and disabled third-party cookies. As pointed out by the user jobo on Neowin, the photos come from livefilestore.com. However there's no need to enable third-party cookies as jobo suggests in order to fix the problem. Instead livefilestore.com can be simply added to your browser's list of cookie exceptions. For Firefox this list is found within the preferences under the Privacy tab and then the button Exceptions...