lightning surge hit the house

OK... here's what happened.

Saturday night, checking email and about ready to respond to something here on the forums. I knew there were storms coming in from Raleigh... still out of ear shot. I could see the flashes but not hear the thunder.... at least 15 miles away.

Out of the blue a lightning flash fairly close.... not a hit on the house, but when it flashed, a spark and a pop from the phone on my desk. followed by the thunder... not really loud.

The computer didn't blink because it was on a surge protected UPS.... the lights blinked and I clicked on shut down on the computer.   A check of the phone revealed it to be totally dead.

So... I fired up the computer today (not my DAW.... my business machine) and it seems to run fine. The only noticeable issue is that web pages and the internet run slow..... some sites won't even load, and trying to DL files today has proven to be impossible.

I have checked the other computers and the lappy which is wireless, seems to run OK... that's what I'm on now.

Did a virus scan with MSE & malware bytes, and that did not seem to find anything or improve the speed. I also ran a memory check, that showed all is OK...

Any ideas?

Lightning could kill the computer, but probably not make it stupid. How are you connected to the internet? Since most of what you describe as slow is internet connection, possibly the phone lines (cable?) took a hit.

OK... this morning.....everything is back to normal speed.... all seems to be working good.

I'll keep my fingers crossed that it stays this way.  It could have been some sort of issue in the telecomm building up the road where the telephone company gear is located.

My plan was to call their tech support today if the speed was still slow and I was having issues logging on to sites.

One site that was damn near impossible to view yesterday was face book, but that was fine just a minute ago.

I'll see how it all goes today.


thanks for the suggestions.

One day I arrived home to find LEDs lit up on some pieces of high-fi equipment, even though they were switched off.  It seemed  bizarre and inexplicable, until I found out from neighbours that the front wall of the house had been hit by lightening a few hours earlier.  Fortunately none of the equipment was permanently damaged, but the phone line was down.

OK... here's an update and response to posts.

Update: I called the DSL provider, an spoke to tech. I told them were I was located and they confirmed that there were several outages in NC due to storms and the area I am in was one that was experiencing sporadic outages and slow downs as a result.

I am in the fire/security systems business. 95% of ALL my lightning/surge damages come in to the panels via the phone line, not the AC power line. Phone line grounds are apparently not as well grounded.
As a result, I install high quality surge protectors on ALL phone lines for my systems in front of the panel phone line input. This includes my house. 
I was hit last year and THAT surge took out the surge suppressor and the panel dialer as well as my office phone and fax.
This surge was not big enough to damage anything else, but was sufficient enough to get the weak link, which happened to be the cheap phone.  The surge suppressor will limit the surge to about 140v or so.... and that will not damage most of the phone line equipment, but it can cause damage to a cheap or poorly designed circuit, allowing an arc to jump a pair of close traces, and this can result in a spark when that arc happens. Light a lightbulb sparks when it blows out.

So far I have not seen any other damage, and have not checked the computer today to see if the net is back up totally. It is working fine with this lappy.

The surges can come through the dsl/cable modems and through routers, to the computer via ethernet cables.

Not many of us think about all the connections to the box.

I often disconnect the net cable during big storms.

A client recently got whopped. No hardware damage, but it reset the phone machine,  and nuked all the settings in the DSL modem and the router. 'Twas confusing for a while.

Same thing just happened to me.  It was the ether net card.