Holy cow man,that is nice! congrats. I too am in the market for a laptop because I need to be able to have a pc in the front room when im watching the kids. Francis how do you like that fujitsu that size of a pc would be ideal.can the little ones play any kind of games? Diablo 2 and similar...
im not familiar with either of those routers as I dont use them, but most lower end stuff usually have somekind of always connected feature. make sure that is enabled.
its a common problem with comcast, the modems they rent too you are junk. do yourself a favor and buy a motorola surfboard modem and get rid of your modem fee, and you wont have anymore connection issues.
Just add a switch in there, and you are done the easy way. if your gear has auto mdi/mdix it wont matter if you use a crossover or straight through cable. decent switches are super cheap nowadays, no reason too waste time setting up another router when you dont need to.