Yeah, I've got that exact model of Router and it was about the best thing you could get for a SOHO back in it's day. Can't say that I've ever upgraded my firmware though.
Have you tried pinging the router yet? You need to make sure you have a valid network connection before you do anything else.
Port Forwarding with this model of router should be no problem either. It doesn't have a nice gui interface to make the configuration changes but I think you can make just about any change to it you'd like. So far as I remember about the only weakness this model had was that it didn't do too well when you had mupltiple people connected to the router trying to play the same online game at one time. I think that was more of NAT issue though than a problem with the router itself..
Oh, and the IP number you should be using is 192.168.0.1 unless you've changed it in the settings.