new member couple... of questions please help

Heres a website I found, thank you to Brandon for doing all of the work in it.
Identifying Electronic Components

Basically, if you want $ its best to just clean out the equipment and remove the boards, separate them into different grades and sell them like that.
If you are scrapping computers, there's the CPU, Motherboards, Slot processors, the Hard drive board, the CD/DVD board, the power supply.
When you start finding enough of it, you end up getting other stuff too. DVD players, Telecom equipment, Flat screens, monitors, Cellphones etc.

There's different ways of cleaning stuff down, like you can just sell power supply's 'as is', or cut the outside wires off it, or take it apart and scrap it down. If its a decient one and works, you can sell it as 'useable'.

All in all, the best $$ is selling for reuse, after that its saving up and selling the higher priced boards whole, Memory sticks, Telecom, Hard drive boards, Motherboards are worth the most.
Then the slot processors (daughter boards?)
Lowest price is for power supply's and the brown circuit boards, like from CRT TV's.

A lot depends on where you can sell your escrap first. You need to find a place that buys it and get their prices and in what grades they buy it in.

Picking individual parts off circuit boards is probably not worth doing. Unless you have a buyer for it, by then you will have a buyer and prices/grades for everything else you will get.

Do a lot of searching here on SMF about grades, compare pricing and find if there's escrap buyers close to you. And what their prices are.
Given that the esrap buyers buy whole but cleaned (no battery's or large low value items on them) boardsand process by the ton, X 10, if not X 100.. They can get most of the valuable metals from the boards.

They even get the solder from the boards and can separate the lead/Tin/Silver/Bismuth out to sell it.
They even get the Copper from in between the, as many as 14 layers of fibreglass in the boards, and then they sell that fibreglass fluff to Steel mills to cover their molten Steel as a flux.

It simply is not worth even trying to get valuable metals from escrap yourself. You need a lot to process to get any amount of Gold, you get less than 1/2 the Gold, never any more than 75% and that's the people who really do know how to do it, and you miss getting all of the other metals, and then, nobody's going to buy that 'gold' without a expensive assay of it to know what's in it.....
I have not mentioned the dangerous chemicals and their expense or the tooling needed yet... And the danger..

Best thing, collect, scrap down, clean down, separate and grade, collect grades, sell for $, buy Gold bars with those $$.
That's if you want to see some Gold, in all, it all looks the same, Goldish, like Brass is, but shineyer.
Paper $$ looks more impressive.

Good luck and post pictures here of what you collect. We like photos.