Stormy weather

[johnridley]

So Friday night, J & L were at the Tigers game, which had 4 hours of rain delay, and they didn't get home until 5 AM. T and I went to TKD and then out to grab some lumber for the basement and a present.

We came home to no power. Read for a little while, then went to bed. "I'll start the generator if the power isn't on by morning." About 11PM, the neighbor knocked on the back door and informed me that we'd had a VERY close lightning strike; he lost his projection TV and maybe other stuff, and had an electrical outlet physically blown out of a wall. I decided I'd better get a head start on what our damage was, so I got out the generator and started in.

I spent the whole weekend rebuilding computers. Very frustrating work. Mostly the computers that were not plugged into surge protectors (unintentional) got damaged or destroyed. No hard drives were lost, thankfully.

Tally so far:
PVR (MythTV) box: mainboard dead, other components OK. I liberated an old Duron 900 mainboard/CPU from rmeidaking's house; 900 MHz is actually totally adequate for this job for now, though response is a bit slow and it doesn't have any spare slots so the 2nd tuner idea means eventual replacement. It's working but I have not gotten the ethernet port working yet so it's running on the programming info it downloaded Friday morning.

Family PC: mainboard seriously wiggy. PATA controller dead, SATA OK, so I Ghosted the PATA drive to a spare SATA and got that up. However, the ethernet port is dead, so I dropped in a PCI ethernet card. Sound card is just making weird noises. I'll be replacing the mainboard, hopefully with an exact replacement since otherwise I'll have to buy a new copy of Windows (or more likely, switch from XP to 2K).

Cable modem and router: total loss. Replaced modem with exact model (Motorola). Replaced router with what was on sale. D-Link. I figured I'd give them a chance. The alternative in the cheap range was a weird brand that is reportedly built by Belkin, and they're on my "avoid" list due to evilness.

The VPN/RDP machine I use to work from home: I think the ethernet port is fried. I haven't investigated thoroughly yet.

Garage door opener: the IR sensor is dead. Replaced with one from the next bay over, but even though the sensor appears to work, the opener still thinks the door is obstructed. So that's probably due for replacement as well. It WAS on a surge protector. However, the wire to the sensor is quite long and could have acted as an antenna and picked up an EM pulse from the lightning and fried just that circuit.

I'm betting there's other stuff as well that we will discover eventually.

And, I got to work this morning and discovered I left my lunch at home. Maybe I can hunt and gather some food somewhere here.

Comments

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

Might have a MB for you -- 2.8GHz P4, it all depends on if I can get the other IBM box to light.