port problems?

untill 2 days ago, when a bad storm came through, my kids computer worked fine. no problem getting online. now, the ports are missing from the device manager. i cannot get on line. this is an older gateway computer that i purchased at a garage sale. i can't figure out what to do. my computer(a new one ) is fine. can anyone help? thanks

Did you try rebooting the computer? If you have XP with the "system restore" feature on maybe it will fix the problem.

You can try to go to Start Button>Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>Scan for Hardware Changes.