Recently, I had the opportunity to set up a brand new computer for my Dad. The male parental unit was quite frustrated (understandably) with his really old computer and wanted a new one that would most importantly work stably and be simple and straight forward to use.
He didn’t like the idea of learning to use a tablet, he can’t handle touch devices too well, he still uses a candy-bar feature phone, for example. His main usage was web browsing and he wanted a good PC on a low budget.
I’d been hearing good things about the Raspberry Pi’s latest released model, so I decided to plunge into it and assemble one “desktop” computer, have fun with it and then hand it over to Dad when done. The parts procurement and assembly went decently smoothly, check out the unboxing and setup video to see how the new Raspberry Pi 2 works.
On usage, the web browser is quite decent, the major gripe with it is of course, that there is just about no straightforward way to get Youtube working in the web browser because none of the 4 major browsers have gotten ARM versions that can support all the requirements of Youtube, yet even with their new HTML 5 player.
In the video, we unbox and set up the Raspberry Pi 2 kit. All the separate components are shown including: The raspberry pi 2 board, the enclosure, a USB power adapter and USB cable, Samsung Evo 16Gb SD card, HDMI to VGA converter, and mouse and keyboard. We also go through the basic setup and how the components are to be connected, and then walk through NOOBs setup for Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi 2.
You can get the full starter kit from Amazon. Alternatively, Flipkart has the Raspberry Pi 2 board as well.
For me, the total assembly cost Rs. 5,245/- which works out to about US $82.