In a previous post I showed you how to install and configure the Android SDK emulator to boot up quickly. What you may have found out by now is that the emulator is incredibly slow. In fact it is only any good if you have the kind of PC that can render the entire Transformers movie in a few minutes.

If you are just interested in running Android applications on your desktop PC, a project called Android x86 provides a copy of the Android operating system compiled for x86 processors. The latest release is Android 2.2, which is a little bit behind Honeycomb (Android 3), but is still capable of running almost all Android applications.