For many years, people have been trying to use Android on their notebook and desktop computers, primarily for the development, debugging and testing of the apps meant for the mobile devices. So far this was limited to running Android from within Windows, Linux or Mac operating systems. But now some developers have come up with an Android based operating system called Remix OS for desktop or notebook computers. It is a fork of Android-x86 project that already makes it possible to run and install Android on a desktop PC. However Android-x86 is the vanilla version of AOSP for PC and may not support hardware as much as the Remix OS does.
For some mysterious reason, Remix OS is available in a format that limits it to be run only from a USB 3.0 flash disk drive at present. So if your PC does not have a USB 3.0 port or you do not have a USB 3.0 capable flash disk of at least 8 GB capacity, then you are out of luck. In addition, your PC should have 64-bit CPU. Although not mentioned, but you can easily guess that the CPU should be pretty fast (more than 2 GHz) and the RAM should be more than 2GB for good performance of the Remix OS.
After downloading the Remix OS package from the Jide website (download is only around 700 MB), you can extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP archive to a folder, launch Remix USB Tool and install it on the USB disk. You may have to format the USB disk in the FAT32 format before this. After the installation, you can reboot your PC.
When your PC reboots, press F12 before the BIOS text appears and then choose the USB disk from the boot menu. This will display the Remix OS screen where you can choose to boot into the “Guest mode” or the “Resident mode”. In the guest mode, not settings are preserved while in the resident mode, the settings are saved in a data partition created on the USB disk.
Further loading of kernel and drivers takes places before you are shown the familiar Android screen. You will find that while Remix OS is essentially Android in its core, it is redesigned to work on the desktop computers complete with the taskbar and notifications near the bottom edge of the screen. It does not come with Google Play Store so you cannot really install any apps, but you can browse the web, play videos and music. However, you can side-load the apps by downloading the x86-64 version of APK files.
Conclusion: Remix OS is a fork of the Android-x86 project redesigned to work on a desktop PC. It uses the Android Lollipop 5.1.1 base and supports all the Intel/AMD based CPU’s. However, at present only works from a bootable USB flash disk and cannot be installed on the hard disk.
You can download Remix OS from http://www.jide.com/en/remixos-for-pc.