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nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

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nudone:
a few nights back a lightning strike hit a tree about 50 metres away from my house. it was a rather surreal event, which reminded me of the death-rays in Spielberg's War of the Worlds; their was a strange humming sound then a brilliant white light and then a sound that made me think the house had been hit by a bomb (all that was obviously the tree being hit and its branches exploding off).

as i'm in England, thunder storms tend to be rather unineventful and i just leave all electrics plugged in and powered on. which is exactly what i did this time, except the computer was powered off - i thought this would be sufficient. my error.

the lightning strike has killed my computer and several of the neighbours computers. our broadband is dead, though the phone line works fine. the neighbour living next to the tree has been without power after their entire electrics were damaged, a few plug sockets charred and melted.

Now, the point of this little story is that i'm wondering how can i prevent this rare event happening again; i don't like the idea of having to buy a new motherboard/cpu/etc each time there's a bad thunder storm. you may say, just unplug the computer from the mains power supply, which is true; the problem is that i may not be there to unplug the machine if i've left it running and an unexpected storm arrives.

as it goes, i think it was a freak storm, but i'm not going to take the view that lightning never strikes twice. the weather patterns around the world appear to be changing so i'm sure there will be more "freak" storms over my house in the next few years.

okay, enough waffling. the question is, would anything have prevented the damage whilst keeping the computer powered on?

would an "uninterruptible power supply" have saved the computer? that's about the only thing i can think of trying. i obviously don't want to buy one if they aren't going to prevent the same thing happening again.

thankfully, none of my data was harmed. but i shall be building the new computer with several redundancy and backup layers built in as the lightning strike has made me realise just how catastrophic the data loss could have been.

(i'd been toying with the idea of upgrading the pc for a while so nature simply stopped me from procrastinating further: new machine will be: i7, 12 gig ram, solid state main drive, etc. Which, i hope, will be a noticeable improvement on the athlon 4800, 4 gig ram, raid 0.)

Carol Haynes:
In theory a good quality UPS should prevent this - but how long is a piece of string ?

Presumably if the strike is sufficiently sever to melt power sockets it is likely to destroy a UPS too - whether there will be sufficient protection to stop it zapping the computer too is a case of 'suck it and see'.

If you have household insurance it looks like a good time to fill out a form!

mouser:
wow.. that is scary.  what a relief you didn't lose any major data.

i look forward to hearing whether a UPS would actually protect you against such a thing.

it may be that the only real cure is to unplug your pc from the outlet in a heavy storm.. though i've never done that myself.

eleman:
i look forward to hearing whether a UPS would actually protect you against such a thing.
-mouser (June 30, 2011, 04:20 AM)
--- End quote ---

An online UPS would save you (though probably die valiantly in the effort), while with line interactive (cheaper) ones your guess is as good as mine.

mouser:
eleman, how do we tell if we have an online UPS or not?

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