I’ve finally gotten the website back up.  There have a been a few changes that made it somewhat hard to bring it back.  Below is a brief summary of what I did.   I took  a ton of Google searches and forum reading to get here.  I plan to describe things in more detail  at some point to help others like me.

First, my pc died.  Then I had to convience Dell to send me a brand spanking new Alienware m17X almost fully loaded.  Next, I swapped out the one deficiency in my new m17X the RAM.  It came with 4GB  (2x2GB), but I’ve upgraded to 8Gb (2 x 4GB) and fixed the BIOS to run it at the full clock rate.  I also bumped up the processor clock speed to 100% since the default was 85% or 90%.  That got my computer up and going again.

Next, I got a new Belkin PlayHD 800 router.  Its got dual 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios from which my new laptop can take advantage of.  However, the firmware absolutely sucks and couldn’t host my website through it.  So I loaded a version of dd-wrt into it.  It took some more time to get the two USB drives up and going, but now our home network seems to be working great.

Finally, I reinstalled all of the tools needed for the webpage (Apache, PHP, MySQL) and a few extras (uVNC, WinSSHD, Filezilla FTPS, and the ps3 media server).  Now presto, I am writing this post 🙂

I just completed my first update to WordPress and it was painless!