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JCC77's avatar
JCC77
Copper Contributor
Sep 04, 2020

MS Teams Crashes often on Core 2 Duo laptop

Hope everyone is doing well.  So, just as many other families, we've had to pull out several laptops and computers to join our increased remote calls and meetings.  We've already purchased a new lapt...
Meetings
microsoft teams
  • HenryPhillipsNimbitech's avatar
    HenryPhillipsNimbitech
    Sep 06, 2020
    Hi,

    Sometimes it is not enough to have the right amount of memory spec wise as if older, it will be slower memory. As it is more the speed of memory that improves as 1GB is 1GB. Same is true for HDDs in terms of Solid State.

    However sorry for propably stating the obvious.

    I would try the web version if not done so already and see how that performs?

    I would also check task manager and confirm that the memory and CPU utilisation are indeed coming from the Teams application? I am sure it will as it is quite thirsty but nothing that should stretch a relatively modern machine, which I appreciate this is probably not.

    Also right click the Teams icon in the system tray and do get log. It might have something worthwhile.

    Also how much CPU and memory are being utilised when Teams is closed and just the OS running out of interest.

    However to summarise it does sound like the high mem and CPU utilisation are the problem but would be good to do a few more checks before spending your hard earned.

    Thanks

    Henry
HenryPhillipsNimbitech's avatar
HenryPhillipsNimbitech
Bronze Contributor
Sep 06, 2020
Hi,

Sometimes it is not enough to have the right amount of memory spec wise as if older, it will be slower memory. As it is more the speed of memory that improves as 1GB is 1GB. Same is true for HDDs in terms of Solid State.

However sorry for propably stating the obvious.

I would try the web version if not done so already and see how that performs?

I would also check task manager and confirm that the memory and CPU utilisation are indeed coming from the Teams application? I am sure it will as it is quite thirsty but nothing that should stretch a relatively modern machine, which I appreciate this is probably not.

Also right click the Teams icon in the system tray and do get log. It might have something worthwhile.

Also how much CPU and memory are being utilised when Teams is closed and just the OS running out of interest.

However to summarise it does sound like the high mem and CPU utilisation are the problem but would be good to do a few more checks before spending your hard earned.

Thanks

Henry
JCC77's avatar
JCC77
Copper Contributor
Sep 14, 2020

HenryPhillipsNimbitech thanks for your kind message and empathy.  My 9 yo kid attends her Teams classes on the laptop.  Because of that, it has taken me some time to monitor the usage of resources.  Your comments gave me several ideas.  Here is some of the collected info.

 

  • When we get out of the MS Teams app and we leave the PC idle, CPU usage goes to 5% and memory to 50%.
  • When we only start MS Teams, CPU goes to 99% and memory to 85-90% for the first minutes.  
  • Later, if you leave MS Teams idle, no conference open, CPU and Memory go to about 10% and 65% respectively.
  • If you join a multi-user meeting with audio and video, CPU goes to 99% and memory to 85-90% for several minutes.  During that time, the PC is pretty much tied up.  It becomes extremely difficult to do simple tasks like re-sizing the app (Teams) window, muting/un-muting audio, etc.  Trying to open a browser window after 2 minutes of opening Teams becomes just incredibly hard.  After some more time, both the CPU and memory usage tend to decrease.

There was one thing that caught my attention.  After more than 30 minutes in a conference, CPU and memory usage had stabilized at around 10% and 70% respectively.  Then, the teacher asked the kids to play a simple, basic-type, educational online game.  So, we opened a browser (which took a couple of minutes or more) and tried playing the game.  The online game just became terribly slow.  It was running at about 2% of its normal speed!  And I am not talking about Fortnite, no, this was just wordwall.net/play/2250/274/779.  I discarded that WiFi were the problem by simultaneously opening the online game on an iPhone on the same network.  It worked well there.

 

After all of the above and several other pieces of evidence, I've decided to buy a second new laptop.  I will still work on trying to improve the performance of the Studio 1530 as we sometimes use 4 computers simultaneously at home and conference calls over Teams seem to be increasingly necessary for all of us.  So, thanks again for your recommendations.  It seems to me that MS Teams minimum PC requirements need to be elevated or the app needs to be enhanced as to use less of them in the Windows OS.

 

Take care.

  • HenryPhillipsNimbitech's avatar
    HenryPhillipsNimbitech
    Bronze Contributor
    Sep 15, 2020
    Hi,

    Thank you for reporting back.

    Microsoft have this user voice that I think is their we are constantly looking to improve performance: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17219609-teams-uses-600mb-and-is-super-slow

    One other thing that has just come to me, if you click your profile icon in the top right > settings. There is a disable hardware GPU hardware acceleration option. Might be worth enabling and see if that helps.

    Also was the web version teams.microsoft.com any less resource intensive?

    Thanks

    Henry
    • JCC77's avatar
      JCC77
      Copper Contributor
      Sep 17, 2020

      HenryPhillipsNimbitech thanks for sharing that link.  I no longer feel alone and see that multiple other users consider that MS Teams uses resources in excesss, RAM memory above all.

       

      We did try MS Teams online.  At first it worked well.  Although it seemed to pull the same amount of memory than the MS Teams app, the simple actions in the online version (resizing screen, muting/un-muting, enabling/disabling camera) worked almost immediately.  This was not the case with the app.

       

      Unfortunately, after 10 minutes or so, the online version dropped from the meeting.  When we tried to join again, it would idle and just display "connecting..." indefinetely.  Because of that, I had to switch to the app.  This occurred two times within a couple of hours, when I tried to use the online version.

       

      In summary, my conclusion is that MS Teams uses too many resources.  In Resource Monitor I can see that it uses over 1 GB of RAM on our system.  On a 4 GB computer that runs Windows 10 this becomes problematic.  I've heard of other uses that work on Windows 7, 4GB RAM and seem to have less problems.

       

      I'll continue trying your other recommendations.  Take care, regards.

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