performance - Why is the Android emulator so slow? How can we speed up the Android emulator?

I have got a 2.67  GHz
Celeron processor, and 1.21  GB of RAM on a
x86 Windows XP Professional
machine.

My understanding is that
the Android Emulator should start fairly quickly on such a
machine, but for me, it does not. I have followed all the instructions in setting up the
IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in starting the emulator quickly, but
that is very rare. How can I, if possible, fix this
problem?

Even if it starts and loads the home
screen, it is very sluggish. I have tried the href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_%28software%29" rel="noreferrer">Eclipse
IDE in href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_%28software%29#Releases"
rel="noreferrer">version 3.5 (Galileo) and href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_%28software%29#Releases"
rel="noreferrer">3.4 (Ganymede).