What are the lowest adequate system requirements for building Android?

[eurodiesel]

Specifically, I'm curious about the RAM since there isn't much info about the minimum requirements about ram.

A little background info:
I have bought myself a second hand laptop, a Thinkpad R61. I plan to use it as a portable workstation (sort of) since i can't carry my desktop anywhere I want, obviously.
The CPU is a Core2 duo t7700 2.4 GHz, and i plan to keep it. The hard drive is a 5400rpm 160gb hdd, which is going to be replaced with an ssd. The ram is difficult to decide, though. I have 2 gb ddr2 right now, and I can shove in 8 gb max but that's expensive. I'm planning to go for 2+2 kit, but i don't know if that's enough.
I don't care if the compilation will take a long time, i just need to know whether 4 gb total is enough.
Oh, and keep in mind that budget is tight. Thanks.

 

[garwynn]

A T7700 is probably going to take a very long time. Even building a kernel on a Q9500 was over an hour in 2013.
Get the RAM if it's very cheap or free, but I'd honestly save the money and put away to buy a newer laptop.
In the long term you'll get a far better result.

You may honestly be better off looking at building on a remote machine. Several places (such as Amazon) will let you create a VM that you can connect to and run remotely. As long as you don't go crazy on that you may even be able to get that for free. If you can get that, far better to go that route and saving your hard earned cash for a new laptop.

 

[eurodiesel]

A T7700 is probably going to take a very long time. Even building a kernel on a Q9500 was over an hour in 2013.
Get the RAM if it's very cheap or free, but I'd honestly save the money and put away to buy a newer laptop.
In the long term you'll get a far better result.

You may honestly be better off looking at building on a remote machine. Several places (such as Amazon) will let you create a VM that you can connect to and run remotely. As long as you don't go crazy on that you may even be able to get that for free. If you can get that, far better to go that route and saving your hard earned cash for a new laptop.

Yeah, using a cloud service is what I am thinking lately. I think I might benefit from the uni's agreement on Azure, if there is such thing.
The laptop is fine actually despite it's age, the classic thinkpad keyboard is great, the whole thing is usable with win8.1 x86.

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