If you are just learning how to build android apps, and if you have access to an android phone, here is my advice:
Skip the emulator and use the phone.
The emulator is a good concept and essential for testing, but its performance was too limited on my laptop. It took minutes to load up, used up a significant amount of system resources, and occasionally froze the whole system. I attempted to optimize the settings to improve the performance of the emulator, but the difference was insignificant. While there is some benefit to meticulously going over each of the emulator's settings to find if any was the trigger that would give my emulator decent performance, it was all in vain.
The better way is to plug in a phone and to debug directly. Now, the time from opening up Eclipse to seeing a running project on my phone is just a few seconds. Given that my phone is comparable to my laptop in computing strength (it even has more RAM), this isn't entirely surprising. Also my laptop now has more free resources available for further development.
While using an emulator is something I do not recommend for the beginner android developer, I expect to use it more if I ever get close to releasing an app.
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