2 airport extremes, PC and MBP...

Hello all...  Thaks in advance for al your help..   I have 2 airport extremes throughout my house, and the wifi seems to work pretty good.  I have a desktop PC hard wired from a an 8 port switch which in turn in hard wired to one of the expresses.    My pc can not detect airport utilities (keep in mind, hardwired)...  also, I want to add an external hard drive so we can stream movies on the i pad and such.  Would it matter which of the 2 airport extremes I place the external hard drive onto??  Thanks.. Richard

Ok thanks for providing the network details. I believe I understand your configuration now. As far as the Extreme base station they should all be good with them all interconnected by Ethernet. The only issue I see is the Extreme in the laundry room as far as it signal quality. If there are large metal boxes (washer & dryer) these are not going to let the Wi-Fi signal travel very far and could case some of the signal to "echo" back towards the base station.
However before making any changes it would be a good idea to establish a signal quality baseline of your existing setup. From there we can make some suggested changes to see if any help improve the overall bandwidth for streaming.
The other area we will look into will be data transfer rates between some of your network equipment to see where there may be some bottlenecks.
Let's stay with signal quality for now. What we are going to want to measure is the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) at various locations where you will use network clients for either or both Internet access and for streaming.
Check out the following AirPort User Tip for details on how to take these measurements. The will work best if yoiu have a laptop. The goal is to get a SNR reading of 25+ dB at each of these locations. This will tell us that you are getting decent siqnal quality at each of the locations that do. Please post back your results.

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    Jul 05 13:44:23 Severity:5 Internet Configuration leased -- host <10.0.1.5/255.255.255.0> gateway <10.0.1.1> dns <10.0.1.1> wins lease <86400> domain
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    Jul 05 13:44:27 Severity:5 Connection accepted from [fe80::222:41ff:fe38:b149%bridge0]:52207.
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    Jul 05 13:47:45 Severity:5 Deauthenticating with station ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (reserved 3).
    Jul 05 13:47:45 Severity:5 Deauthenticating with station ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (reserved 2).
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    Jul 05 13:51:49 Severity:5 Connection accepted from [fe80::222:41ff:fe38:b149%bridge0]:52243.
    Jul 05 13:51:49 Severity:5 Connection accepted from [fe80::222:41ff:fe38:b149%bridge0]:52242.

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