
I hope this fixed it. However, now my father is really mad, since he has nowhere near the tolerance I have for these problems. The DNS relay is not working on this router. Fortunately, someone else had the exact same problems as my father and me (we both have the DIR-827) with a different router ( ASUS RT-N66U). He said this:
"Long story short: The current Asus firmware (3.0.0.4.260) does not allow disabling of DNS Relay, which seems to be an issue. I was getting many timeouts and "server not found" errors while browsing the web. This was not happening while I was connected directly to the cable modem; only when the router was installed. Also, it was happening over a wired connection, so it wasn't a wireless issue. To get around it, I manually entered my ISP's primary DNS IP into the router's LAN settings page. That updated the primary DNS IP on my PC's network settings from 192.168.1.1 to 75.75.75.75 (Comcast). Everything started working beautifully after that."
In the DIR-827 we can disable the DNS relay function, so after updating my manual internet connection options with the primary and secondary DNS servers from my status page under the WAN section, I disabled the DNS relay function. Now I can see SSL web pages in addition to non-SSL pages.