If you got a new wireless router, there might be some settings in there that are relevant to your ralink wireless card. Generally, wireless cards in a computer are going to operate on standards like b/g/n or what have you, and in your wireless router, you may need to ensure that it's set up to work with the mode your PC's wireless card is operating on. If you give me the make and model of the wireless router, I can look at the manual and see what might be relevant for you to look into. Surely, the difference between all your devices could very well be the type of wireless card in them and how the wireless router is set up, especially if the issue began after getting a new router.

For the event viewer, if you can open it up, in the left panel you should see "Custom Views". Double click that, then in the middle panel you should see "Administrative Events". Double click that and let all the events load. You may see a bunch of Warnings and Errors. That's what you're looking for. Minimize the Event Viewer and start surfing around doing what you'd normally do and when the wireless connection drops, bring the Event Viewer back up and click "Refresh" on the right-hand pane. This will refresh the middle pane with all the events. If there are new events at the time your dropout happened, they're likely to be relevant. Copy + paste the text from the "General" tab for the events and we can get a better idea of what's happening, assuming the events turn out to be useful.

I followed the instructions on there and disabled WLAN autoconfig without much idea of what I'm doing. When I disable it my internet stops as well however.

My services does not have "WZC" which was the other thing I could mess with.

I'm considering going back to ubuntu. It's probably comparable in its intuitiveness by now.

Awesome. I got it up and will be sure to post whatever it records during the next drop.

My router is an xfinity arris tg 8626/ct

Here's a picture of the relevant setting in the router I was talking about:

http://setuprouter.com/router/arris/...1879-large.jpg

Look the same?

yes accept I have a MAC address instead of protocols

wat

What options do you see if you click Edit?

hold on it just did it

on the event log a box originally came up saying "windows cannot find the file specified"

here is the error message(?): As for your question
the options are:
network name
mode
security mode
channel selection
network password
show network password
broadcast network name

also my connection stayed disconnected this time(never happened before) so i had to plug in my Ethernet.

do you have gmail?
want to gchat this?

Try method one and two:

Event ID 1014: Microsoft Windows DNS Client - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki

ok, it omits windows 8 under what operating systems it applies to.

Do it anyway?