Category: AndroidStudio

Android studio on Windows PC

A question that I often see users asking on the internet is “Does Android studio really work on 4 or 8 gigabyte RAM machine” , “Android studio system requirements”
.

The short answer is Yes . It works but it depends on the Oprating system your machine has.

According to the official Android studio webpage :

The minimum RAM required to run Android studio is 4GB. And the recommended RAM is 8GB for Windows, Linux ,Chrome OS and other operating systems .

Android studio is used for Android apps development. To develop and design an Android app we need to set up Android environment on our system.

I know many of us who are curious about how this software works have searched online for the informations but the thing is we sometimes get confusing informations on the internet and that really demotivates us.

I am not an expert in Android development. I am a medium level user like many of you who knows how to create a basic App
from the scratch so in this post I am going to share my personal experience with Android studio software. I will share with you my Operating system details and how I managed to turn my low-end PC into a Android development machine.

I use 6GB RAM PC for Android studio

The installed RAM in my machine is 6GB and it’s Windows 8. The processor is Intel i5 64bit fourth generation.
The following is the screenshot of My PC configurations :

My PC has a 64 bit Intel i5 processor 1.6Ghz clock speed. The hard drive capacity is 500GB .

The performance is much better when you are not doing any heavy tasks such as playing games and editing photo/videos.

Like others, I was so excited to install the Android studio Software on my system. I went to the download page and installed the latest Android studio version on my 64bit machine.

The installation took quite a long time , 15 minutes in my case and when everything was ok I tried to open the software but unfortunately it crashed my system. The software took 10 minutes to open and the PC hanged.

It was really frustrating . I somehow managed to bring my system back to normal by shutting down and restarting the PC.

I opened the “create a new project ” tab and created a basic app but again the system hanged when I tried to run the emulator to test the project app.

I know many of you might have experienced this kind of issue on a low-end PC . Android studio works but you can’t run the emulator as it consumes so much system RAM.

Another thing that most people don’t talk about is the PC storage system. The performance of a A PC with hard drive is always slower then the PC with a SSD (Solid state drive) .
Android studio is not that heavier software itself but its emulator takes about 60% of the RAM in your system and that’s the main cause of the system failure.

I have managed to use Android studio on my 6GB and 4GB RAM machines with upgrading a few things on my systems.

I upgraded my hard drive to SSD (Solid State Drive)

My system with a regular hard drive was performing really slow so I had to replace it with 1TB SSD .
A 1TB SSD these days is a bit expensive if you buy it from a reputed Brand .

I paid $120 for this upgrade.
The reason why I had to upgrade to SSD is because of the fact that Hard drive slows down the system performance.
Hard drive works on a rotational machenism. The data is read an written based on the disk rotation. SSD on the other hand doesn’t contain any rotating system to store or read the data as it’s done electronically.
After upgrading my machine to SSD , My system performance changed and read and write speed of my PC was 100 times better then before.
Heavy softwares like filmora and Android studio took a just few seconds to open on the screen .
My system didn’t hang for Android studio after doing the hard drive change. But to use the Android studio smoothly on A 6 GB RAM PC I did another change on my system.

You can buy SSD (Solid state drive) online from Amazon from the link bellow. The Crucial SSD is less expensive and costs less then 3K for 240GB storage.

I use my real Android device as emulator

PCs with 4 , 6 and 8GB ram are still considered to be Low-end machines even if your system has a SSD instead of HDD.
You can not play games.
Some heavier softwares like Android Studio can not work properly especially if you are using Windows.
To use the Android studio smoothly on my windows machine, I use virtual device instead of Android Emulator to run my test apps.
With a virtual device, I can use the Android studio without any system performance error.

Minimum System requirements to run Android studio on Windows and Linux

My experience with Android studio has really been awasome. I started with a 4GB RAM on Windows and upgraded HHD to SSD. I learnt alot about Android studio system requirements along the way.
If you follow Android studio system requirements manual and start with a minimum 4GB RAM machine then you are going to face a lot of issues in the beginning.

The minimum RAM 4GB as suggested by Android studio isn’t actually the minimum and the recommended 8GB shouldn’t be recommended . You can read it as 8GB minimum , 16GB recommended.

Android studio works perfectly fine on PCs with 16 to 32GB RAM.
You won’t need an AVD but instead you can use Android Emulator without any problems on 16 to 32 GB RAM machines.

Windows versions for Android studio

To use Android studio on Windows PC , you must have one the following operating system versions :

• Windows 7
• Windows 8
• Windows 10

And the minimum screen resolution should be 1200*800 .

PS:
Graphic card is not really required for Android studio.