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Install Android 4.0 on your Laptop/Netbook

By on October 25, 2012

You don’t have a Tablet to have all the fun and features of android? Don’t worry. If you have a Laptop and Netbook which is quiet boaring with the ordinary operating systems, then this post is specially for YOU!

Android being lightweight and opensource, you can freely modify it and try it on your device on your own risk, and have fun. If you have a low hardware configuration laptop/netbook, then this is preety much for you. Just take 5 minutes to read this carefully, and 15 minutes to install it on your old burned hardware laptop (only if there are no problems while installing).

You can now install Android 4.0 on your Laptop/Netbook. This is not something which I invented by myself, this is done by a guy Martijn van Beek. He says,

My conclusion this far: it works pretty good with a keyboard and mouse/trackpad input, maybe even better for writing messages etc. than on a tablet. The +Google Play Storeworks, and I am able to download and install apps on my Android netbook. The built in camera works in conjunction with the camera-app, and wifi is working. Video streaming from the web ( +YouTube , +Vimeo etc.) seems to be a problem, even though I installed the +Adobe Flash Platform app, but local video files are playing fine.

You will install this on your own risk. We will not be responsible for any damage to your device .

Requirements :

Some notes by Martijn van Beek :

I tried to install Android on an SD-card, but this failed, for whatever reason (even though I read somewhere it should be possible). So instead, I decided to just install it on the netbooks hard drive, which I wiped and reformatted (to NTFS) prior to the installation (using Parted Magic ).

Take note: it seems Android can not be installed to a FAT32 formatted partition.

Another issue I ran into was that, before completely reformatting the hard drive, I succeeded at first to install Android, but it wouldn’t keep the Android settings after power off (resulting in having to install it over again).

Once you have Android installed, I would advice you tick uncheck the “screen auto rotate” box in the Android settings menu, because some apps will switch to portrait mode and this does not really work on a laptop/netbook.

Remaining question for now:
is it in any way possible to increase the hard disk space that is allocated to Android? The netbook has a 250GB harddrive and it would be great if Android could use all that space for downloaded files etc. I haven’t found an answer to that yet.

Follow all steps correctly and have fun of using Android 4.0 ICS on your laptop/netbook!

About Shubham Rajdhar

Shubham is a Technology and Smartphones lover from India. Pursuing his degree in IT engineering. Besides technology, he loves riding bike, chatting with friends. Feel free to add him on social networks.