Something it sounds like ... If your Linksys has MAC authorization set,,, temporarily turn that off. Or put the new dell wifi mac in the allowed list. Hopefully if you understand 'Shared and Open' systems. Could be an oversight there too..

There are partition size limits, and your new drive exceeds these limits for some formats. Did you first format the drive? Your earlier drives may have be pre-formatted. If the new 160 GB drive has been formatted as one partition, it is either formmated as a NTFS drive or used special extentions for a FAT32 drive. You will loose this special formatting if you format the drive again as a FAT32 system. Refer to instructions that came with the drive. If the drive has not been formatted, then you can not write to it until it is formatted. NTFS or FAT32 ? NTFS provides greater partitions and more reliable disk operation. NTFS uses log files to keep track of all disk activity. Win XP can use this journal to repair files after a system crash. Windows 95, 98, ME can not recognize NTFS volumes. You need a FAT32 volume as the boot volume for these operating systems. This restriction does not apply to files on a network. The boot record must be on a FAT32 partition for these earlier Windows sytems. On partitions greater than 8 GB, NTFS manages the space more efficiently than FAT32. The maximum partition size for a FAT32 drive created by Widows XP is 32 GB; A single NTFS volume can be up to 16 terabytes (16,384 GB) using default settings. The Fdisk utility in Windows 98/ME can make a partition greater than 32 GB on a FAT32 disk. Use a bootup disk from one of these two systems to do this. After formatting the extra large partition, Win XP can use it. The main reason for using FAT32 is compatiblity to the older system and/or software. If you are constructing a multi-boot system and one of these sytems is the older Windows system, the FAT32 system is needed for the older version of Windows. If you have only Windows XP or Vista, I recommend NTFS. Its a good idea to scan a new disk for bad sectors before using. Presumably, the manufacturer has already scanned and marked off the bad sectors, but I did have one 80 GB external disk where this had not been done. It gave me trouble until a complete scan was performed. A few bad sectors were found and marked off. After that, the disk performed flawlessly. So first, format the disk and then scan for bad sectors. This will take some time for a 160 GB disk, but it well worth the effort. If the disk is already formatted and is what you want, scan it before using. With a disk of 160 MB, I suggest that you break this into 2 partitions of approximately 80 GB each. The partitions will not be quite as large as 80 GB because part of the space is used for file management and directories. Put the operating system on the first partition and use the second for data. The next question: Do you at any time have two hard drives connected to the computer? If so, the hard drive with the operating system must have its jumper set to "master" and the other disk to "slave" (assuming that both drives are connected to the same cable). While setting up a new drive using the existing computer, you may find it necessary to switch the jumpers a few times depending on the job at hand. Hopefully, your computer's BIOS is capable of auto-recognizing the hard drives and can make settings accordingly, else this has to be done manually. Please let us know if any of this information was useful.

I'm going to try Bugspop1's suggestions. I have Xfinity1 and ATT routers, so it may be perilous and require calling them again for help. Also both routers have been replaced in the past 2 weeks because of other problems: The ATT router suddenly and mysteriously stopped allowing any telephone caller ID and calling features...the technician who replaced the router said he didn't know why this happened or what caused it. ATT provides 3 mbps speed, which is (from my experience) not fast enough for Amazon video, so we use ATT mainly when Xfinity isn't working. We have just one phone connected to ATT. The Xfinity/Comcast router was replaced last week because of tv issues. I got fed up with the poor service on the last cable boxes. All channels not HD were stretched to fit the format of our HD tvs. So all the people on tv look like they weigh 500 lbs. Comcast refused for months to provide info to change this in the setup menu of the cable box. So after hours on the phone to them and several trips to their store, we now have tv that shows HD and SD in the proper formats. I also had to accept yet another phone line from Comcast, their bundle, to save money. Their internet/tv bill was $270. The new bill including phone is now supposed to be $190. The stupid downside to this is the Comcast rep said I have to call Comcast on the phone number they provide, otherwise they won't provide any support. I already have 4 phone numbers so this is very annoying to me. After the cable boxes were replaced the internet router was reset by Comcast when they set up the cable boxes. That evening I logged in to the xfinity web site and saw that some videos would play and others wouldn't. CNN wouldn't play anything at all (though accessing the site outside of the xfinity portal allows some videos to play). So I called up Xfinity support who weren't helpful at all. They actually said they don't support video playback help issues on their own site! So their support is less than adequate imho. I tried the suggestions about changing video quality...Amazon works ok in SD. In HD videos start off in very poor quality and gradually get better. I don't use amazon streaming when I'm out of town because the site only streams in HD and would quickly use up my data allowance. Windows Defender is up to date. Nvidia has automatically updated it's drivers several times since I got the MSI laptop. The MSI also did the update where it installed a new version of Win10 (It took about 17 hours). There isn't any software in common on the two laptops. I tried a system restore on the MSI. It didn't help, but it didn't hurt. I uninstalled and reinstalled Adobe flash several times. If I can get inside the router setup menus is it easy to figure out if the routers are allowing adobe flash video? I'll keep working on this....

To all you kind people: Update Some things I have managed to do so far: Made a recovery flash drive / Installed Classic shell, which has been a big help / installed my husband's Bible Works software and FireFox, our preferred browser. Today in my spare time I am working on getting and installing Open Office, having no need for and no desire to pay for Office 365, which we could have had a free trial of for one year. I don't want to start down the path of subscribing to the Office software, when all we need is a word processor, so am hoping things will go well. It seems that to download O.O. to the laptop was going to take "1 hour and 1 minute," so now I am about to see if I can download it to a flash drive on my PC and use that to do the installing. (Update on that: It worked fine. Downloaded in a flash and was easy to install, though I did have to override the laptop's warning that it wasn't from the App store, so might be dangerous.) Oh, and I have ordered an external DVD/CD optical drive so as to be able to install the OED, as my husband uses that a lot, too. Things are looking up, but he has not yet begun to try to use the laptop.