Fuze & micro card: won't work together

I have an old Sansa Fuze (from before there was a Fuze Click) with 2GB of internal memory.  Aside from doing things that I fumble-fingeredly unintentionally tell it to do, it works fine.  I use it mostly for audiobooks.  Now I have set up my pickup to play what’s on the Fuze through the vehicle’s speakers, and I want to keep lots of audiobooks available, so I got a 32GB microSD memory card for the Fuze.  But I can’t get files I copy onto the SD card to play on the Fuze, or even stay on the SD card.  The micro card is not write-protected.  Oh, do I have questions!

[My computer is a Dell Latitude 7470 laptop, about 3 yrs old, running Windows 10 Pro.  Before that, I had a Latitude with Win XP Pro, and I still find the change to Win 10 at times difficult  (I’ve used Win 7 & 8 on other people’s computers with very few problems, but I really know nothing about Windows versions after XP and before Win10; I  suspect that’s part of my difficulty.)]

Questions–

1- I have to copy the files I want to use onto the SD card when the card is in my computer and then put the SD card into the Fuze, right?  Is it correct to say files can’t be copied into external storage when the SD card is in the Fuze?

2- I’ve done that, several times and several ways, and they won’t play on the Fuze. 

2A- trying to play the file that is now on the SD card inside the Fuze, with the Fuze running on its own battery, things look good until I hit the play button (top > on thumbwheel).  It does not start the playback and the “play” icon does not change to “pause” (||) as it would if hitting the play button made the play command engage in the Fuze’s innards.  In fact, the viewscreen of the Fuze freezes, and none of the controls (on the thumbwheel or outside it, like the main “Home” button) is responsive.

2B-  trying to play the file that is now on the SD card inside the Fuze, with the Fuze running on the computer’s power via the USB connection, I get an error message as soon as Windows Media Player opens; on the WMP screen,  “Media changing…”  appears, then a WMP error-message window appears and says “Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file.”  Clicking on the Web Help button in this window leads to all kinds of suggestions about other Media-Player issues.

2C-  trying to play the file that is now on the SD card inside the Fuze again, this time with the Fuze running on its own battery again, things look good again insofar as the “play” icon shows up right away on the Fuze’s display screen; it even changes to the “||” when I press the play button on the thumbwheel.  But there’s no sound.

2D- trying to play the same file using the computer (having put the SD card back into the computer), things proceed exactly as they did in “B” above.

3- After doing A, B, C, and D another time or two (not all in the same session or even the same day) I wonder if the SD card needs formatting.  So I format it, leaving the “Quick Format” box checked.  A window appears and says formatting is happening, but its progress bar shows nothing and even “1% complete” does not appear.  I move my cursor over to the first Format window and try to click on the Format button, but it is unresponsive and stays that way.  The Properties page for the SD card says the card is okay, and another properties  page (I forget for what) says that the card and devices like it are functioning correctly. 

So, do I need to re-format the SD card?  And

How can I format it when the Format button is behaving like plain text, with no colorful margins that would indicate that it is a button that will respond to a click? 

Please help.

If any of you knowledgeable people were physically present and did not say "Oh, all you need to do is . . . " right away–that is, if you were here with me and the answers to my questions were not obvious to you, I would say “Here is my good old 2GB Fuze.  You can have it to figure out and keep” and then I would go and buy a new model Fuze with a vary large internal memory.  But none of you is here, and no one I know who lives in Harbor, Oregon wants such an old player (mostly because they think “old” is surely not so good as “new” just “because”), so I can’t give it away.  And I am the kind of person who perseveres with problems until they’re solved or until I know they can’t be.  So

Please help.