My tablet died, but I have an old laptop sitting around, so thought maybe there was a way I could turn the old laptop that is collecting dust into something that could run Android so we could play some games from the Play Store.

I've read so many articles on how to run Droid on Linux, but they all seem to be different and the comments after them don't give me great confidence any quite work right. Anyone have any experience with this?

I have experience with 32 bit i386 Android 6 installs on single core atom netbooks with 2 gig of ram.

How old of a laptop are we talking here, and give a link to specs like a review. So folks know what you are talking about when you say "old laptop".

Which is not a lot to go on.So far.

This old laptop has a touch screen? Note that you can access google play from a desktop or laptop, that's how I've downloaded songs I've purchased on a different system. Perhaps you ought to consider chrome as opposed to android, they seem very similar to me.

android-x86 exists and can be written to a usb stick, and thus booted from.
not sure about installing it to hd.

To add to my thoughts involving touch screen, please realize that to me there will be "use" problems. I.e. if the tablet doesn't have a touch screen, OK there's mouse, however android touch is multi-touch, and also some games use the accelerometers to detect angle. My kids used to play some pyramid running games where you had to tilt the tablet or phone to get things to play the game. Not that a laptop can't also have multi-touch, but just saying.

So while you may get Android OS to run on a laptop, you may consider whether or not the games suitable for a table UI interface will work properly on the laptop. Same thing for app. Instead I'd put a version of Linux on it and use it that way, but that is just preference.

My install was on one of these

https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Co.../dp/B01FT6VSCS

Which uses a passive touchscreen. I found that Android 6 rc1 32 bit i386 did not play well (sensitivity wise) with my passive touchscreen using my plastic touch pen that came with my netbook. Also. The deal breaker was when I plugged in my
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge phone. Then Android 6 would pop up a message something had to close. Even though no apps open. I don't remember the exact name because
I blew that install away and put the netbook up.

My netbook has 2 gig of ram so it has plenty of power there. CPU is a single core atom n270 though which I figured may be a little on the weak side of things.

It was just a trial experiment by me on seeing if I could get plug and play on my Samusung phone with another netbook besides my Acer C710 ChromeBook running Parrot GoogleOS.

For playing games. I find any Linux install with a dosbox install included. Like AntiX. Lets me play freeware dos games.

Which uses less computer resources on older laptops than Android 6 games will.

But the OP has not yet defined what old computer means in their view.

Sorry for the late reply. It's an old Dell Latitude, maybe 5 years old, will have to look at the model number next time I'm near it. Definitely not a touch screen. Hardware is fully functional.

If Android x86 doesn't work well, try Genymotion. It runs in VBox with it's own interface. There are still quite a bit of Android apps that don't support x86, so there is an ARM translation zip you can install. There will be a big performance hit using ARM apps on x86 though.

FWIW, Dell has been making Latitude brand laptops since the 1990s. It covers a very wide range from ancient 32 bit single core dinosaurs to currently produced models. ~5 years old is more useful; I'm guessing that it's at least a Core 2 Duo. The amount of RAM may be significant to how well this thing will handle Genymotion. The video chip's capabilities will also have a big effect on how well it handles Android games via Genymotion.

It has an i5-3320M @ 2.6GHz
8GB RAM
Intel HD graphics 4000

Appreciate all the help here everyone, would be really cool if I could get this going in some fashion. I anxiously await to see what everyone recommends now that I have the specs.

You can run android live 1st before running the installer. From ram. You have enough ram to do this.

When I did this. I just went ahead with the installer.

The version I used and md5sum checked was

from here

http://www.android-x86.org/download

I used dd to make my bootable usb. The instructions are on the site above. If dd is too hard to learn. LILI or Unetbootin is recommended by the site.

1 members found this post helpful.

what a shame your going to muck up a nice computer like this with android
edit
but it's your computer

thanks rok, I'll give it a shot. I'm familiar with dd. Nice to see I can get some use out of my old machine.