Randy Dean's Microsoft Teams client crashed during a client meeting because three separate Teams processes were running simultaneously from earlier sessions that never fully closed. Task Manager revealed the CPU overload was causing audio problems, video freezes, and an unresponsive interface. A complete system shutdown and restart ensures only one Teams instance runs.
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All right. Hi everybody, Randy Dean here, the Email Sanity Expert. I'll make myself a little bigger so you can see me better. Um, I wanted today to make just a really quick video about something very interesting that happened in Microsoft Teams for me earlier this week that might save a bunch of you some big-time problems. Um, so I was asked to speak at a client event they were utilizing Microsoft Teams. I was the speaker logging into their system. Here's what happened. I tried to log in about 15 minutes early using the Teams link they provided, and it became very evident very quickly that my Teams was hanging up. It was like the screen was blocking, the sound quality wasn't good, and I was having trouble toggling back and forth between other programs. Now, you may not remember this, but I would imagine a number of you remember way back in like Windows 2000, there was this keystroke combo that you could use when your computer hung up, or if you needed to do a hard shutdown called Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Well, that keystroke combo still works. And one of the things that brings up is this thing called Task Manager. And so I brought up and I opened up Task Manager to see what was going on on my computer because of what was going on with this Teams meeting that I'm desperately trying to log into so I can start my client meeting on time. And here's what I found. It was bizarre. There was 3 active versions of Teams running at the same time. Uh, imagine if your computer had 3 versions of Outlook running at the same time. It's not going to work. It's going to take up the entire CPU, and the system is going to basically lock up. That's what was happening. And so I sort of did this diagnosis. I had been in some other Teams meetings on previous days. I had never done a full shutdown and restart. And so what had happened was I was in these previous meetings, I would leave the meeting assuming that Teams had closed. It didn't close all the way, it still had an open session. And then I went to another meeting and another open session, then I went to my client meeting, third open session. The CPU couldn't handle it. If you are going to be doing new meetings, the simple watch out tip I would give for you is if you know you've had a Teams meeting earlier that day and you're going to have another one tomorrow, do a full shutdown and restart at the end of the day. Make sure Teams is fully closed. That way it'll be running a single session, which your computer should be able to handle just fine. So By the way, I am planning on making a bunch more Teams videos coming up, so watch for that. That's going to be one of the new things on my channel coming soon. You know, last year I did videos on Zoom and on GoToMeeting. Well, Teams is next, so start watching for those little new videos coming. But this is the first one, and this one might be a lifesaver for you. If you have a really important Teams meeting coming up, make sure the day before or the morning of you do a full shutdown and restart. That might save you a lot of problems. All right, once again, I'm Randy Dean. I'd like to thank you for taking some time to join me on this quick little video today. If you'd like to find out— isn't that clever— more about me and my programs, go check out my website, randaldean.com. If you like these videos, please subscribe to the channel, please hit the like button. And if you'd like to get a whole series of little tip sheets, productivity tip sheets I've created on time management, email management, Outlook usage, smartphone tablet usage, Microsoft 365 tools, Google Suite tools, running better meetings, you want to get smartphones and tablets. If you want to get some of those, send me a quick little email, randy@randalldean.com, and just put bonus PDFs or YouTube PDFs in the subject line, and I'll send you some additional bonus material so that you can take this as deep as you would like to go. Thanks everybody. Bye now.
