My smartphone is dead, so while I ponder on the new one I would like to keep up with Whatsapp messages. Unfortunately Whatsapp can not be run natively on my PC because there is no Windows version of Whatsapp that doesn't require a smartphone.
My goal is to have Whatsapp run in the background on my PC and either use it directly from the emulator or trough Whatsapp Web.
So I'm looking for an Android Emulator for Windows that can be run in background (having a toggleable GUI\minimuze to system tray) and can optionally show notifications from apps as standard windows balloon notification (or the new toast format), or some other way that I can click to show the emulator.
Having the notifications is not strictly necessary as I said before I could use an Headless Emulator + Whatsapp Web to read and write messages. Initial configuration is still needed so in all cases there must be an option to view and interact with the emulated screen.
The last thing is that it needs to be standalone (bonus points for portable/setup-less solution), not relying on problematic third party components like the virtualbox or vmware SDKs.
As long as the latest Whatsapp version is supported, any Android version is good (if lower versions help reduce the memory footprint of the emulation).