I do Android development in my spare time – I work on my app, Movie Pal.

Until now, I have been using a Dell laptop with i7U (2 cores, 4 threads) and 8GB RAM.

Using a browser (Firefox) the emulator (with 1GB RAM) and Android Studio open, I would enter into swap territory… and we all know what this means: The PC becomes very slow, the mouse freezes, etc. 8GB RAM are no longer enough for Android development.

Having just a few hours of time to work on my project per day (and on some days no time at all!) and wasting 40% of the time due to the PC being slow was not really productive. At the end, my girlfriend persuaded me to buy a better laptop.

The System76 Gazelle (gaze12)

So being a Linux fan, I decided to support a company that ships computers with Linux pre-installed, so I chose the Gazelle laptop from System76.

The specs:

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Processor: i7-7700HQ 4 cores – 8 threads

Graphics: Intel® HD Graphics 630

RAM: 32GB DDR4 @ 2400MHz

Storage: 128GB SSD, 1TB HDD

Screen: 15″, 1080p matte

Backlit keyboard

Model: gaze12

You might notice that it’s using an integrated GPU, so it’s not suitable for gaming. This is fine with me as I rarely play games – and those that I do play should run fine on this GPU.

Also notice the 32GB of RAM! This thing will never run out of it! 😃

So I run a simple benchmark – I compiled my project. With the previous PC it took about 3 minutes. With this one, just 51 seconds!!!

Now I can run Android Studio, the emulator, Firefox, Spotify, some other electron app for Messenger without being even close to half the memory!

In the end this laptop cost me quite a bit, but I believe the time I’m going to save because of it is totally worth it.