A little while back I wrote about trialling a couple of Android emulators. BlueStacks and LeapDroid were the Windows ones that I tried out, Leapdroid being better. I then decided a tablet was a better option for Android and also reinstalled Windows to discover Leapdroid had been pulled by its developers and can no longer be downloaded.
There is a third option and that is a package called Android-x86, which is an open source effort to produce a version of Android that can run on x86 hardware. It is generally recommended that it be run only on virtual machines, but it does have a number of issues with things like screen rotation that make it easier to run on a second (or in my case third) computer because the easiest way to resolve the screen rotation issue is simply to physically rotate your screen and in fact until recently I actually had the Windows computer’s screen rotated into Portrait mode all the time.
The problem with that computer is that it is too slow. I bought several years ago, a pair of Gigabyte Mini-ITX boards (GA-E350) as a cheap way of getting some extra computers I could use to do my work. These have an integrated AMD “Bobcat” E350 CPU which is probably really a Geode or MediaGX or something under the hood, a low power onboard chip with a small fan. They do quite well for basic use of web browsing or whatever but have turned to be really slow at a lot of other things. I am now discovering their limitations on a daily basis. Whilst one of these computers would be powerful enough to run the Android emulator, the problem is that the Bios doesn’t support x64 hardware virtualisation properly (it might be able to fix it with a Bios update, but I know I updated one of them and still couldn’t get it to detect properly) which means VirtualBox has to run VMs in slower KVM paravirtualisation and this seems to be extremely slow (the VM first time boot was left running for at least half an hour and never actually completed).
So I will look at upgrading this system to a low-end Skylake board and Pentium G CPU. I could get these both together for about $200. Then 8 GB of DDR4 memory would come in at about $100, so with all the bits I have lying around, upgrading that system for about $300 looks like a reasonable proposition. It’s disappointing I have these computers that just aren’t powerful enough any more. The two E350s have both had 8 GB of RAM put in them to try to get them to go faster, and this is one of the few times this option didn’t work. I would say that made almost next to no difference in fact. The case for upgrading this computer will take a while to justify but I think it will happen in a few months from now, but it will give me a computer with at least five years of useful life. In fact apart from disks or other things wearing out, my guess is I wouldn’t need to spend any more money on computers over the next three years.