Well, my father seems to be having a spot of trouble with his computers.  Went over yesterday to try to fix things, luckily I had the presence of mind to bring over my spare computer.  Neither of his computers were functional.   

The good news first: sort of, anyway...  His "spare" computer works, it was just freaking out from the insanely high humidity.  A couple of his medications make it easy for him to get cold so he prefers to not run the air conditioning (my mother isn't fond of that) even when it's in the 80's.  Of course, the computers are in the basement.  Bad combination.  Left it at my place for a couple hours and it started right up.

And now the bad news: It doesn't take a real genius to figure out that THIS is fried.
 

Of course, it's also a clue when you KNOW lightning hit when it died and when you notice the network cable is FUSED TO THE PORT.  It also took out the router.  Amazingly, the cable modem has survived two motherboard killing strikes while the router only survived the last one with just one of its ports fried.

Now this would be a GREAT opportunity to upgrade MY system and give him my old board but of course we don't have any money right now and Beth's planning on going back to school damn it.