Krystal
a couple of thoughts.
1. BT sent me a brand new home hub without asking for any more ££££ - all I had to do was to sign up for a same-price 18 month deal, rather than stay with the month-by month deal I was on.
2. My level of technical competence sounds a bit like yours. I've had 3 different modem routers and 3 different pcs in my (ahum) study. None of them have been "Voyagers". They've all been plug and play, and worked pretty much out of the box, other than finding where the passwords had been hidden, and how to turn off upnp. Getting the other machines that wander in to and out of the Ancient household has been easy, too.
3. The worst pain is the transmission of old e-mails (in Outlook Express) and old e-mail addresses between pc.s, and keeping OE. The e-mail addresses can be imported and exported to something called csv files in excel, but as i don't excel at that level of detail - I gave up and paid the local travelling IT guy 30 quid to fix it for me. Money well spent. It seemed to take him a few minutes, and it would have taken me years, and many bottles of thought-juice.
Hope that helps.
AO