Review on CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 8GB Starter Kit with High-Performance 8GB RAM by Firman Harrington

I got one of these direct from Canakit a few days ago and tried it out with a fresh Raspian Buster and stretch via "Change Sources for apt and doing the Update and Dist Upgrade ". The last one had a few bumps due to some modifications, but I managed to overcome them and I'll leave this version heavily modified for my tastes. This thing is indeed a possible replacement for a laptop. I have the 4GB version and it's actually difficult to get it to use much more than 1GB - it took a few open tabs (including Gmail) in Chrome, Audacity, a few file managers, a few terminals and finally an Arduino. ide pushed it a little further than 1GB. It was running NGINX, MariaDB, some of my daemons, VNCserver and some other stuff in the background. While not *quite* as fast as my old Lenovo Core 2 Duo (which has an SSD), it's close and probably faster for code that manages to use all 4 cores. The bad: Radiators are in "joke" territory. You almost throttle even when idling. Added the fan shown on the YouTube channel "computers explained" and it stays as cool as it can be now, very nice, Noctua 40mm fan is worth the money. Use a 1.5 inch hole saw on top, very gently. SystemD changes (not rpi's fault) broke a few things again. This actually deleted a couple of my .service files and I had to put new copies in a new location and then activate them via systemctl instead of just figuring out they were in the right directory. There are many nicer things about the Buster.network setup, the CPU temperature monitor in particular is good. get more of it.