RASPBERRY Pi 4 - ( or Why I stopped updating this blog :-)

Seriously, I can't really blame the release of the raspberry Pi 4 for me being slack.  But it does have some bearing on things simply because I have almost stopped using my other computers since the Pi 4 was released.

First, there was a lot of learning to do, because this latest Pi is so much more capable on a day to day level, than any Pi before it.  And then, there was the level of experimenting with stuff to find out just how handy it is, and to try to solve a few little glitches in the way I use the Pi.

I won;t go into the specs and changes that make the Pi 4 what it is, because just about every tech site and blog has covered them.  I ordered the Pi 4 with 4GB RAM, and although that means my Pi was much more expensive than previous Pi models, I could have got the base model for about the same actual dollar price as the earlier ones had I wanted to.

But all up, with the Pi 4 board with 4GB RAM, a decent case with fan and heat sinks, and a 3 Amp power supply, I paid about double what the Pi 3B+ had cost me.  Initially I ran the Pi 4 off a Sandisk 64GB microSD card, then changed to a Samsung EVO Plus 128GB card because it came up on special somewhere very cheap.  But there were a few things that were annoying, and eventually I changed the set up to booting from an old Sandisk Ultra 16GB card that was lying around, and running on my WD 240GB SSD(from the Pi 3B+)  plugged into a USB 3 port.

That works great, does not have the brief lag problems the Pi suffered running off the microSD, and seems faster in some ways than the BRIX that I normall use for day to day stuff.

The UP sides of using the Pi 4 are that at last I have an affordable way to watch 4k video on my 55 inch UHD TV.  And the thing boots up so quickly that I don;t have to wait to start reading news, checking emails etc.

The DOWN sides include the lack of ability to print anything, meaning every time I want to print, I have to boot another computer.  And Audio Volume was so low that I had to install pulseaudio so I could drive the sound from the Analog jack over 100%.  And now I only have Mono audio.  I am not sure it was ever stereo, but I 'think' it was before I installed pulseaudio.

There are a few other little dislikes, but overall, the Pi is my day to day computer until I need to do something serious.

I kept a bit of a diary of my experiences with the Pi 4 from the time I got it, so I will add some of those in the next posts.