How Pi Saved Me!
It all started when I moved back to my native last year due to pandemic. COVID-19 gave me no choice but work from this remote village where I consider myself lucky for the day if I get a constant 5+Mbps speed on my JioFi/AirTel.
I have been using a firm provided laptop to connect to my office machine/VM for the past 6 months. Ever since I moved back, I am nervous about not having a fall back solution for my work computer and its not easy to arrange anything in this remote village. It will be a tough situation if there is any major problem with my laptop and even getting it repaired in this pandemic situation is going to be much more worse. That all sums up to setting up an alternate solution.
Now, I do not want to buy a full blown desktop or another laptop to be a stop-gap solution for my problem. I want my alternate option to be simple. I have a monitor with me, so all I am looking for is a device where I can plug in my peripherals to open a mediocre browser that would let me connect to my office machine over ICA or RDP. Surprisingly, I had this Raspberry Pi hanging around which I have been carrying in laptop bag for a while. I had bought it 5 years ago, which worked and solved my problem immediately, but not quite well. It is pretty old with 1GB of RAM, I had a lite version of Pi running crashing randomly. So I decided to upgrade my Raspberry Pi! Yay!
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
After a few hours internet surfing, I convinced myself to buy a Pi 4 Model B since it comes with pretty neat configuration, a 1.5-GHz Broadcom CPU and GPU, 8GB RAM, the addition of USB 3 ports, dual micro HDMI ports, support for 4K output, all of that impressed me. Initially, I considered buying Pi 400 which comes with lot of built-in hardware and software, but I rejected it due to the fear of uncomfortable keypad experience/losing the modular design experience, say for example if I damaged a key or the entire keyboard, I am not sure what can be done in those situation. Anyways. Pi 4 Model B it is. I was also surprised to see that it comes with builtin Wireless adapter (supporting both 2.4 and 5.0 GHz) and Bluetooth adapter.
I placed an order at one of the approved seller (robu.in) by Pi folks. I purchased the following with expectation of 2–3 weeks delayed delivery due to Covid, not knowing that I do not have that much time.
Surprisingly it arrived with in 4 business days via BlueDart. I am all excited to set this up!
Twister OS seems to be a clear winner due to its wide range of themes. Especially, it comes with easy switching Apple, Windows specific themes. It took me 24+ hours to download the full blown version of Twister OS due to my limited internet connectivity. Finally! I set my Pi with Twister installed. It looked perfect and acts like a perfect desktop.
An unfortunate coincidence happened within a week I set up my new Pi. The day I feared most has come. My firm provided laptop did not power on, none of the basic troubleshooting helped and Dell technical support suspected a motherboard failure when I called. Pi is my primary computer at the moment while I am waiting for the Dell technician to reach me.
Heating Problem!
One thing bothered with the new Pi setup is that the heat it produce, I am not surprised to see this kind of issue with a single board computer, but I was worried about it damaging the board. Luckily, it was simple to fix. People at Pi has this perfectly designed fan which sits perfectly inside the official Pi 4 case. That solved my problem, I configured my Pi to stay below 70'c.
Finally! after few week, I am glad to say that I am using Pi for my work and personal use, in fact I am writing this medium post from Pi!
Thank you!
