I gotta say, that was some real shitty luck that you had. Feels like the one time I had to suffer without a computer for a year.

Yeesh that sounds pretty painful.
Luckily the damage caused wasn't too bad for me to fix. I obviously replaced the modem, router, video card, and bluray player, but all I had to do to fix my TV was replace its motherboard.

Though it wasn't lightning that did that. It was my old power supply that died. And it took my motherboard, cpu, gpu, hard drive, everything except for the single ram stick I had in it. But we did lose a router to lightning a few years ago.

Well power supply failure could easily do all that too especially if it sends a way too high voltage through.
When the lightning hit my PC it came through the HDMI port which was connected to my TV, which was connected to my Bluray's HDMI, which in turn was connected to the Ethernet and eventually the phone line that was struck.

That's why I have surge-protected bower bars for all my electronics.

As do I, but they're only effective to a point. The surge came through the telephone line and exploded the protector. So maybe the damage would've been worse without it idk.

Something similar happened to me once....but the surge wasn't from lightning. It was from inside the house.

My younger brother used to love ground-pounding the living-room floor Super Mario-style, and over time this began jostling the light fixture in the basement until eventually the wires wore so bare that a bolt of electricity arched across the ceiling and scorned everything near it. When we later opened up the light fixture we found the wires had literally vaporized.

While my computer's CPU was damaged, the hard drive and sound card were salvageable so I didn't lose any files thankfully.

Kinda strange that happened. I wonder if your house's wiring isn't up to spec as normally a short circuit shouldn't fry anything plugged into it unless it backfed through the Ground circuit. (However I'm talking through the perspective of standard US residential wiring, it might be different where you're from)

This was almost a decade ago and the house and its wiring were built in the 70s. We replaced that light fixture immediately after with a modern one.

Plus that house had faulty wiring from the beginning. Light switches were backward and in weird places nowhere near where the light they turned on actually was.

That there was the story of my life a few months ago.

Poor Hazel; that machine is her life!

Oh, can I relate! We've lost modems, routers, network cards, USB ports, hardware of all sorts. My brother is an electronics tech and he's taken broad steps to prevent such a debacle again. All the computers have high-quality surge protectors and Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) on the power line. He even installed a TII gas filled, tubular surge protector on the cable as it comes into the house. He also replaced the cables going from the modem to the router with fiberoptic cables to create an isolated system.

It's cost a lot of money over the years, but now the terror is over -- even though we still get daily thunderstorms in the Summer.

That's alot of steps, I would almost say near commercial paranoid levels.
Our current internet comes through a little antenna dish on the side of the house so chances of it getting struck are slim to none but there's always still the risk of strikes through electricity.

I work as a Systems Analyst out of my home. I can't afford to lose company equipment or time to thunderstorms. The paranoia pays dividends.