3 network cards shot, was it my belkin router!

[Reeper47]

Hi guys,
In the past 2 weeks we had a couple of power outs in certain parts of the house due to what we think was a heater or some other device shorting out. After the first power cut my brothers computers which was on at the time had its network card stop working, it would just say the cord was unplugged but no matter what we did we could not get it working again and had to install a new network card. On the second power cut which off course happened from something shorting in the house mine and my sisters computer were on and the same thing happened to them. Both the network cards would not work and hence we have had to install new network cards.

Now my question is, what on earth caused the network cards to go as a power cut should not affect a network card with out affecting the computers? So this leads us to believe that it may have something to do with our belkin router which we recently purchase a month ago. Is it possible that the belkin router let some sort of surge through which caused the network cards to go? Keep in mind that we have a netcomm switch attached to the belkin 4 port wireless router. And all the computers are connected to the switch and the switch is plugged into the router. The computers also had onboard network cards each that no longer work.

This is something I really need to get to the bottom of so it doesn’t keep happening every time my house has a power outage/surge due to something shorting out. If anyone can verify what is causing this, and give some ideas on how to prevent it from happening again that would be great.

Any help is greatly appreciated

[pip22]

The surge could be through the ethernet cat5 cable that plugs into the network card (unless the card is a wireless one). I had to fit a new (wired) network card to my main PC last week after a power surge fried it. I've now got a surge-protector power strip which has two surge-protected ethernet sockets (input/output) and I connect the router to my PC through that now.