PC failure; suspect CPU, but have acrid smell.

[Red Devil]

chances are, most wouldn't fit any recent architecture. current motherboards don't have PCI or IDE or AGP ports, etc.

[Zero Angel]

Not true. AGP parts may be useless these days, but most motherboards have 1 or 2 PCI slots on board, and some new motherboards even have IDE ports in addition to the newer SATA ports. And if they don't you can always buy an adapter for IDE->SATA, though it may also be wise to just get a new SATA drive anyways and put your IDE drive into an enclosure to make it into a portable hard drive.

[Red Devil]

not the ones i've seen. well, at least they are being phased out quickly.

[Froo]

What I mean by, keep it for spare parts, I mean, for the 'other old computer' we have.
It's a little newer than the 'dead' one. But if a piece of hardware fails, then I have a chance
of reusing something from this dead system.