Minimum Hardware requirements for Android development [closed]

Question

Need information about minimum hardware requirement for better experience in developing Android application.

My current configuration is as follows. P4 3.0 GHz, 512 MB of ram.

Started with Hello Android development on my machine and experience was sluggish, was using Eclipse Helios for development. Emulator used to take lot of time to start. And running program too.
Do I need to upgrade my machine for the development purpose or is there anything else I am missing on my machine(like heavy processing by some other application I might have installed).

And If I do need to upgrade, do I need to upgrade my processor too(that counts to new machine actually, which I am not in favor of), or only upgrading RAM will suffice.

Answer 1

Firstly, there is an issue with the ADT plugin and Helios which causes lag with looking up Android classes - use Galileo instead (v3.5).

Secondly, the emulators become more resource hungry depending on the version of Android you're developing for. Example, I have a P4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM PC with Win XP 32-bit and an Android v2.2 emulator takes at least 4-5 minutes to load up. An Android v1.6 emulator on the other hand loads up in less than 1 minute. Remember though that once the emulator is up and running, you can leave it loaded and it will be more responsive than first use.

Also bear in mind that if you give your emulator a 2GB SD card (for example) it will try to create that through virtual memory if there isn't enough physical memory.