Android Emulator is crashing a lot

Question

I am trying to test my app on android emulator. So as soon as, i am choosing run the application, a new window pops up on the screen and after taking 1-2 minutes, it goes not responding.

I also tried running the emulator separately using AVD manager. Using this, i am able to start the emulator; but after 3-4 minutes - it goes "not responding".

OS- Windows 7 32 bit [ intel pentium 3.00 GHZ + 2GB RAM]

Java - 1.6

Android SDK - i have the latest SDK with 3.0 OS

IDE - eclipse Helios Service Release 2.

Plz help, i am unable to do anything.

Update: can you guys point me towards other 3rd party emulators which i can use?

Update2: My emulator is taking too much time in launching now. Can this be a cause? If yes, then how do i decrease the boot time?

Answer 1

(This isn't so much of an answer, but might go some way to figuring out the source of the problem; I'd comment on the original question instead but don't have enough rep to do so)

I keep having this problem too. I have an app with a few activities, one of which contains a layout with a Canvas which runs its own thread to do drawing processing. All of the activities run fine except for this Canvas activity which seems to crash the emulator in the way the OP described (the emulator .exe itself crashes rather than the application within the emulator) if left to run for a few minutes. As far as I can tell I'm not doing anything unusual with the thread - I copied the Lunar Landar example in the SDK and worked from that so I'm doing everything "by the book". The app runs fine on real devices.

So, while I realise the OP may be long gone, could anyone else with a similar problem confirm that the affected Activity is using a Canvas, drawing Thread, or anything like that? This problem is a real pain and I can't find any other discussions/solutions for the matter.

EDIT: I recently did a complete, clean re-install of the most recent versions of Eclipse and the Android SDK with all the updates and that seemed to solve the problem. Guess there was a bug in an older version of the emulator that was fixed in a more recent release.