MS Teams Crashes often on Core 2 Duo laptop

[JCC77]

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 laptop and are thinking of buying another one.  Our old Dell Studio 1537 doesn't perform well with Teams.  It crashes often (only with Teams).  It meets the minimum HW requirements, as follows:

Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo CPU T5800 @2GHz

RAM 4 GB

206 GB available on HD

Windows 10, 64 bits

Display Mobile Intel(R) 4 Series Express Chipset Family

1280 x 800

Memory 1695 MB

VRAM 64 MB

Nevertheless, MS Teams app freezes (>30 sec) or crashes often before or during meetings when:  starting up, pressing Teams mute button, pressing Teams camera button, changing Teams users (log off-log on), moving around the Teams menus, etc.

I just did a clean re-install of Windows (HD formatted), only installed MS Teams (no other software), didn't load our user files, disabled Cortana, etc.  After that, opened MS Teams and before one minute had passed and before joining a meeting, MS Teams crashed and restarted.  I see that the processor is often close to 100% utilization, going down to 80-60% after some time.  Memory wanders around 80-90%.

Strangely enough, we have no issues whatsoever when joining the exact same Teams meetings on our Android and iOS phones.  And we don't have to use the newest phones.  Teams works perfectly on an iPhone 6S and on regular Android phones.  However, they are rather small to join or lead classes.  On them, response time is almost immediate and you can have several apps open simultaneously.

So, I decided to post this before going out to purchase one other laptop or tablet.  I would like to understand what is causing the problem before buying it and having problems with it too.  Is a faster processor more important?  More memory?  Better graphics card?  Thank you.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

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

[#3]

@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.

[#4]

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-...

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

[#5]

@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.

[#6]

@JCC77 @HenryPhillipsNimbitech   You  might be interested in reading this blog by one of our MVPs: https://office365itpros.com/2020/07/22/teams-memory-management/

[#7]

@ThereseSolimeno thanks for your kind message.  I read the article and found it very interesting.  It does explain several things that are commonly unknown to the regular user.

Surely, regular users will not post or report problems trying to disqualify any piece of software.  So, the discussion of whether Teams is a memory hog or not, we can leave aside.  I decided to post this because: a) I became terribly frustrated with MS Teams crashing so often on our Core 2 Duo laptop, b) I thought that other users could be experiencing similar problems, especially at this time on which the use of MS Teams has increased (exponentially?) at a global scale.

The fact of the matter is that our equipment suffers with MS Teams.  This, to a point that I have decided of buying two new laptops for my kids.  I was originally not considering to spend over 3,500 USD on short notice, but I did, also thinking of their future school work.

MS Teams crashes often on our 4GB RAM laptop on very simple tasks like switching users, opening documents, etc.  It also freezes when muting/unmuting (up to 20+ secs), disabling/enabling the camera, resizing the window!, etc.  We have no problems with other pieces of MS software.

Based on MS Teams behavior, I formatted the HD, loaded Windows 10 64 bits and loaded only MS Teams.  No other software, antivirus, malware remover, or anything.  MS Teams continued to struggle.

As I explained before, I am intrigued that MS Teams seems to work so well (in my personal experience) on regular cell phones, both Android and iOS.  So, I concluded that a "light" version of MS Teams does exist.  It would be great if the Windows app could become leaner or "lighter".

Also, I wanted to understand if the problems that we experienced were because of RAM Memory, processor speed/cores, software bugs or any other factors.  This would allow me and others to make a better informed decision when purchasing a new laptop or upgrading our existing equipment.

So, I thank the kind feedback that I got for this post.  I would even be willing to put our current 4 GB laptop to additional MS Teams testing to determine the root cause of the problems.  Based on my current obtained results I believe that in order to attend Teams online meetings, 8GB of RAM are not just needed for a "better experience" but they are a minimum functional requirement.

Take care.  Regards.

[#8]

Thank you for your comments, @JCC77   I will pass them along our usual channels to the development team.

[#9]

@JCC77, I just came across this thread because I was looking for a solution for the same issue you are facing.
I did the same troubleshooting in my Pentium D desktop with 4GB of memory. including OS reinstallation.
Now no other way other than buying a new laptop or desktop for my kid to continue with the Online class. Please share me an idea or a solution u found other than buying a new machine.

[#10]

@JCC77 Just out of curiosity did you try with an SSD? when the CPU and memory were peaking during the teams session did you check disk utilization also?

[#11]

@GP007  Thanks for your reply. I have a HDD in that PC. So instead buying a new SSD for testing, I bought a new CPU cabinet with latest stocks loaded. But still curious to know if any other option other than a SSD. Please comment.

[#12]

Hi. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it work. I ended up buying two new laptops. However, someone told me that similar laptops to our old one can run fine, if they run on Win 7. Ours has Win 10. Regards.

[#13]

Thank you for your time and comments on my questions. I will use my New PC and planning to sell the old one.