Another tip is to familiarize yourself with everything new that you see... if you see a new type of chip or a different looking video card or CPU... take 30 seconds and look them up on eBay. You'll be surprised how often you'll find stuff that still has value to someone on eBay way more than scrap value. I bought $70 worth of computers the other day and pulled the CPUs out of about half of them. Scrap value would have been like $4, but I sold the lot for over $50 on ebay.