Setting Up Android x86 HAXM Emulators

I have recently had tons of questions about my recommended settings for Android x86 Emulators on Windows or on Mac. I have recently moved away from they Hyper-V Android Emulators for VS (which are awesome), just so I have all of the Google APIs around. 

So here we go.

1. Install the Intel x86 Emulators from Intel
2. When installing make sure to set the default RAM to 512MB else it hogs up your machine
3. Turn off Hyper-V by running bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off from an administrator command prompt (more info here) (See more about this below in Q/A)
4. Make sure you have the latest and greatest Android SDKs installed. Here is what mine looks like:

Create new Android SDK with following settings:

As you can see I use the Google APIs x86 an dset everything to 512MB for Ram and storage! Don’t forget use Host GPU. 

Here is an awesome walk through video:

Update 1 (12/6/16):

• Q: Why do I have so many Build-Tools installed? A: No specific reason to be honest, you can uninstall all except for the latest 24.X, as VS/XS will pick up the correct version it needs for building. I just happen to keep adding to them.


• Q: Why do you have to turn off Hyper-V? A: It is important to turn off any hyper visors and Hyper-V because Intel HAXM for x86 emulators is a virutaliation software. On windows machines you can’t have two different ones running at the same time so you have to turn it off.