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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 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.

 

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.

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