This folks is what lightning does to computer chips when it gets hold of it…

This is in fact the network card controller chip that is on my motherboard.

The wife and I were sitting in the lounge listening to the soft rain in the back ground when all of a sudden…

CRACK!

I jumped up from the chair (partly because of fright) to see what the lightning had struck. On entering my study I saw that my Ubuntu PC was rebooting…phew at least it was still “working”.

A quick glance at my ADSL router at it seemed to “look” alright.

My network switch however – DLink DES-1008D – was not in such a good shape. Unplugging the network cable left the Connection light still shining. I unplugged the power and then tried again…same symptoms…sigh…

Now to check the PC more throughly. No network connectity from the onboard network card… On opening the box I noticed that the controller chip featured above had blown. The rest “seemed” fine…A quick scratch thru my “parts bin” and I found an old Intel 100Mbps PCI network card that I put into the machine to restore network connectivity – can’t be without internet for to long…

Amazingly it seems that lightning had struck the Telkom line, entered the ADSL modem/router, passed straight thru (without damaging it), hit my DLink switch (blew it) and then took out the onboard network card. Thankfully nothing else was plugged into the network at that time, and the Playstations were on wireless…

Time to contact the insurance company and find out it they will cover it… At least the damages were not as bad as what they could have been…Eish!