I am very excited to try my hand at electronics repairs. My typical solution has been “just buy another one” - but that doesn’t scale well. But, since seeing Alex’s YouTube channel - I have started holding on to the broken devices too in hopes that I can repair them (and learn a bunch too). 

my logic is that if you have a known good device - you should be able to fix the broken one by comparing. But, since many components are not marked, I am struggling with component identification. 

I hope to one day be a help to others who are getting started, but for now - I am going to blow your mind with some of the dumbest questions ever.  But, soon - I hope to contribute to this forum instead of just consuming the content and expertise. 

so far, I was able to straighten all of the pins on a Ryzen 9 3700x CPU with the microscope camera V2 - that thing is amazing, and the CPU fits into the socket again - it was a 400 dollar processor when I bought it - so reviving it has nearly paid for the cost of the microscope

Is there a “New to the forum” section that explains guidelines and membership levels?  I have seen “member”, “registered member”, and other labels for users - but I haven’t seen what all it takes to achieve such status.

I assume the moderation period is an anti-bot mechanism, does that end after a certain number of posts/replies?  Or is it a length of membership type of deal?

Happy to meet all of you and I hope to learn and grow with you all. Thank you Alex for building this community - I hope you get all the success you deserve.