Thanks so much guys for the feedback. It may interest, that in the space of the past week I've had
not one or two, but
three physical reasons for
three confusions I've experienced:
(1) When hearing about "reset" button, I had assumed it was that black button on top of the router, because neither the quick-guide pamphlet, nor the box, explained what that button was. (I still have to look up what exactly it was that I pressed, and if that might have caused any damage.
the remaining experiences below are not relevant to the Router, but may interest: (2) Hours of time were wasted with MJ-Chat agents and on my own, trying to figure out why Audio wasn't working, even though I checked out Systray
and the thinkpad-speaker-keys (near Access-IBM button)
and the System sound settings/sliders.
It turned out, that because I had been doing so much "physical tinkering" with sundry cords & cables & USB-Hub, the jack which connects to one of my Speakers had gotten disconnected.. The disconnected cord just blended in with the rest of the black tangle behind the desk, unnoticed.
(3) Huge amounts of time wasted with MJ-Chat trying to figure out why my phone connections were not functioning properly, until (with the last agent who was a cut above the rest, and had even phoned me via my Speakers, and ensured we kept up communication via WordPad even after the Chat.app's auto-disconnect nuisance)... we were brainstorming together toward the very end, and then, after he suggested changing cords, and I suggested trying a different USB-adapter, I then had a hunch, having remembered what the phone guy who connected me had said. He said if there's problems in future, just remove the Splitter from the wall jack.
(see pic. below).. Well, after that, the Agent's test-call successfully reached my computer-room phone, albeit the phones in my other rooms had no dial tone. Which probably points to the ancient, probably-corroded, phone wiring in basement (not necessarily the Splitter).
In other words, the transition from DSL to Cable (and from MJ-Plus to GO) probably created more powerful surges & speeds that the old wiring cannot handle, even if it [inefficiently] handled it the past two years. Because people didn't always reach me, even with MJ-Plus, and there had been other issues. But aside from that, even when I had the exorbitant POTS there were periods of instability, which could have been either the old copper wires running to Verizon HQ, or alternatively, could have been the old wires in the basement. But now that the POTS lines are out of the equation (due to Cable) the basement wires just might have been the culprit all along.
Re: the Router IP-number, I had researched the Linksys forums, and found out the possible reason for the "2" instead of "1" may be because the prior owner had a combo modem-router, and so the additional Linksys router's IP needed to have a "2.1" since her combo-modem-router was already labelled "1.1". Of course, my terminology is over-simplified, but that's the gist.
Edited by jally, 18 January 2017 - 02:47 PM.