Android Studio is slow (how to speed up)?

I recently upgraded from Eclipse to Android Studio and I'm not really liking the experience. I'm comparing them both on a Windows 7 64 bit ultimate with 16GB of ram and Intel i7 4770 running NVidia Geforce 780 with the latest NVidia drivers if it matters and I'm running the latest JDK and the latest Android Studio.

The Android Studio is very slow in building the project which I can live with but it's also extremely resource intensive and sometimes slows down the PC to a crawl.

Whenever I'm building or running anything in AS, my PC seems to become extremely sluggish. It also causes flickering of screen and occasionally blanking my second monitor if I click on "Gradle build running" spinner which I find very odd. The RAM usage also shoots up to ~3GB which I find excessive for doing nothing (this is when it's idle after a few builds).

In addition, the panels at the bottom of AS keep jumping around which is a horrible user experience (moves from Android to Messages to Version Control or anything else on an ad-hoc basis depending on what's happening which is very, very annoying).

What I would like to know is basically:

1) How do I make Android Studio run better? I may be doing something wrong or missing some updates that I'm not aware of and I'm sure others have also noticed these behaviors and have found some solutions to it.

2) How do I "pin" the bottom panels so that they don't jump around and instead, let me, the user, navigate to them when I wish to instead of automatically switching them?

Many thanks and my apologies again if it's not the correct place for these questions.

Edit 1
Some more comments:

• I'm using the latest stable build as of today. The build is Android Studio 1.2.2 Build # AI-141.1980579, Build on June 3, 2015


• The behavior happens when using either Java 7 or 8. It doesn't appear to be related to the version of Java.



• I am not using Presentation Mode. Just the vanilla view.


• Doing the changes to the build configuration (thanks to @Blackbelt and his answer) appears to have helped with the build but the other problems with sluggishness and general user experience remain.