Update:

From this article, the Raspberry Pi 4 USB-C power port was designed outside of official USB-IF specifications, making it incompatible with many USB-C chargers and power supplies. You can read more from the link above. The analysis leading to this conclusion was conducted by well-known Google engineer Benson Leung.

The Raspberry Pi is a collection of small computer boards assembled in a simplified way to form the foundation of a computer system. The Raspberry Pi (also known as RPi) was released in February 2012 in the United Kingdom. Its original intent was to provide a low-cost, simple computer platform for students to learn and develop on.

The original model became far more popular than anticipated and quickly expanded beyond its intended educational market into areas such as robotics. The platform does not include peripherals such as keyboards or mice, nor does it ship in a case. It is, quite literally, a bare-bones product.

To give you an idea of its popularity, Raspberry Pi products sold more than 19 million units from their 2012 launch through the end of fiscal year 2018. This places the Raspberry Pi among the best-selling computers in the world, albeit with limited resources. Until now.

This week, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Pi 4. It is an impressive upgrade. Here are the key specifications:

• A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3× performance)
• 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM
• Full-throughput Gigabit Ethernet
• Dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking
• Bluetooth 5.0
• Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports
• Dual-monitor support at resolutions up to 4K
• VideoCore VI graphics supporting OpenGL ES 3.x
• 4Kp60 hardware HEVC video decoding
• Compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi products

In addition to the hardware improvements, the Raspberry Pi Foundation says the new system includes an extensively modernized user interface, an updated Chromium 74 web browser, and a transition from USB micro-B to USB-C for power. The new connector supports an additional 500mA of current, ensuring a full 1.2A is available for downstream USB devices even under heavy CPU load.

The new boards are available to order now.

In the past, users have attempted running Windows on the Raspberry Pi platform, but performance was predictably slow. With this new configuration, we are curious to hear who has tried it and how it performs. Feel free to share your experience by emailing gmo @ getusb dot info.

Problem: Windows Will Not Assign a Drive Letter to a USB Flash Drive

This issue can occur on Windows 8 and Windows 10. You unplug a USB flash drive, plug it back in, and Windows fails to assign a drive letter. That’s a real problem, especially when every other computer handles the same device without issue.

There are three solutions. All of them can work:

1. You can open Disk Management and manually assign a drive letter to the device. This works, but it’s a repetitive and inconvenient fix if the problem happens often.
2. There’s a good chance the driver or registry entry for that device is corrupt. Use the USBScrub tool to remove old USB registry entries. In many cases, this resolves the issue immediately. Download USBScrub
3. Use DiskPart and enable the automount feature.

• Open Command Prompt as Administrator (search for Command Prompt in the Start menu, right-click, and select “Run as administrator”).
• Type diskpart and press Enter.
• At the DiskPart prompt, type automount enable and press Enter.
• Type exit and press Enter.

For solution number one above, Disk Management is essentially the graphical (GUI) version of DiskPart, but with a reduced feature set compared to what DiskPart can actually do.

DiskPart includes dozens of useful commands for managing storage devices. One of the most important is automount, which controls whether Windows automatically assigns drive letters to newly connected volumes.