The other day I was working on a friends laptop while he was away. I had networked my PC and his and was using my ADSL connection to download stuff to his laptop. A thunderstorm caused my PC to cut out and reboot. After this I could not get the PCs to recognise the network. I reran the network wizard and although I can ping each PC from the other, they are not visible in network places.
But this is minor compared to the infuriating failure of my internet connection to connect to half the sites on the net. Diagnostics say that FTP via port 21 is being denied by my firewall. I have been running Zone Alarm for years and have no such setting. If I disable the firewall it makes no difference. However it prevents me accessing many sites that may (?) help me solve the problem.
Are you having the Internet connection problems with both machines or just the desktop?
If it’s both then it’s probable that the thunderstorm damaged some of your networking hardware. Try unplugging the power to all your devices for about half an hour. Swap out any that you can to narrow down the cause of the problem.
Why were you online or even had the computers plugged in during a thunder storm?
You have fried hardware like the above post said. Hook one thing back at a time, the modem, let it get stable, then hook a computer to it and see if that works. If not borrow a laptop that is working and see it it does on that modem. Rinse / lather / repeat with all the hardware until you find the bad one.
Then fix or replace.
You could have fried parts of all four pieces of hardware.