Q: i have an older sony vaio desktop with a crashed processor. it had an intel pentium 4. i was wondering if the pentium 4's nowadays would fit in that one? are they the same type? my sony is a PCV-RX650
A: that's a pretty old PC using a socket 478. new Intel processors (including P4's) uses nowadays socket 775, therefore they won't fit in that mobo. what you need is a Pentium 4 (Willamette or Northwood) with FSB 400MHz, socket 478. http://www.contactpc.net/Pentium4.html the oldest P4 i've found (from Newegg) is a P4 Northwood with 533MHz FSB. best bet for you is searching on ebay or the like. p.s. are you sure it's only the CPU that is fried? i suppose the chances are in best case 50:50 the PC will run again after changing the processor. p.p.s. you don't need the belarc advisor, here are the specs of your computer. http://esupport.sony.com/perl/model-documents.pl?mdl=PCVRX650 click on Specs / Marketing Specifications