help?

I have a tower and two laptops. I am a total novice when it comes to fixing them. Lightning hit a tree our house and surged the power through the house, burning out a few wall plug-ins and several telephones. It blew out my wireless router completely and might have done some damage to my tower/monitor, but the monitor still lights up-says "no signal," the tower boots and runs, but I can't see if it is working properly because the monitor isn't communicating. I thought the monitor was no good, so I went to a second hand store and bought one. When I hooked it up to my tower, I got the same thing. I think it must have something to do with the plug in on the back of the tower, but not sure. I would just chunk it and use my laptop from now on, but there are two very expensive programs on it (Quark) that I no longer have the original disc to and I really need the program-can't afford another $800 program. Any way of getting around this inexpensively?
Thank you in advance!