I recently been using the $35 Raspberry Pi Model B 512MB version as a mini desktop computer which you can use for many tasks like playing classic games like Quake 3, watching video with XBMC, making a web server, using as a wireless router, and other tasks while also saving money since the Pi only cost $35, and it uses very little electricity. I seen videos online of people using the Pi to make a mini laptop, classic game console for playing older games, using it as a media player, making a digital camera, robotics, and many other fun, and interesting activities.
I like how quiet the Raspberry pi is since it uses a SD card instead of a hard drive, and it has no cooling fans, so there is no noise from the Raspberry Pi like a traditional laptop or desktop which makes noise because of mechanical hard drives, disc drives, and cooling fans. The Raspberry Pi also uses very little power since it uses a Micro-USB Cell phone charger to power it, and the CPU, RAM, and other parts on the Pi does not use a lot of electricity.
The Raspberry Pi also does not generate much heat, so it would not heat up your room like more power hungry, and hotter running computers. You also do not have to manually clean dust out of the case fans on a Raspberry Pi like a traditional PC and laptop because the Pi has no fans, and don’t require additional cooling.
The Raspberry Pi is a good computer for using XBMC to stream/play video and music from a USB drive, the internet, or another computer you own. It is also good computer for learning about computer programming since Rasbian, which is the Raspberry Pi operating system, comes bundle with computer programming programs.
The Pi also can be used as a web browsing computer for browsing smaller text and image based website like forums, blogs, and static websites, but it would be a slow experience when browsing bigger websites with lots of animation, images, and background music compared to browsing the bigger site on a regular desktop computer. I recommend using the Midori, or Netsurf web browser which comes bundled with the Raspbian operating system for the Pi. There is also Ice Weasel Firefox and Chromium ,and Opensource version of Google Chrome, web browser which you can install manually on the Pi. I used the Pi to visit blogs, forums, e-mail websites, news sites, and search engines. The Pi loads most sites at a reasonable speed. The speed of page loading takes a few seconds more than a desktop PC which is more powerful. If your internet connection is not very fast, you may not notice much slow down when loading sites. But, I recommend only having 1-3 tabs open on your web browser on the Pi because having too many tabs open may slow down your Pi.
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