The traditional corporate laptop is an i5 with 8GB RAM. This works great for most applications except for intense video processing. Historically that was fine but now everyone is using Microsoft Teams users may have problems when sharing their screens.

When you share the screen you increase resource use (CPU, Memory, Network) and this can cause applications to slow down. You can work around this problem by,

1. Rebooting your PC before important calls to clean out any zombie processes
2. Closing all web browsers or only having tabs you need open to reduce network load
3. Start Teams meeting without any video effects on your camera feed because blur and backgrounds are CPU intensive.
4. Work on local versions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents to reduce network contention.

These steps should alleviate most problems.

Other solutions

Verify and update Windows

• You could have a corrupt system. Working as admin run “sfc /scannow” (10mins)
• Run Windows update to ensure you have all the latest software and drivers.

Upgrade or replace your PC

Microsoft now recommend 16GB of RAM for heavy teams users. If you can add RAM to your laptop then this a good thing to do. However, if like me you have a Microsoft Surface device this cannot be upgraded and the only choice is to live with the restrictions or buy a new device.