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Cheap laptop for MS Teams

Thank god I stopped working eleven years ago. I only had to endure one (1) 'electronic' meeting (via phone, no images) where the people on the other side of the Atlantic chatted about their chritmas shopping in NY and I, finally, delivered one sentence of something not very meaningful. One hour of my life waisted.

I pity you.


No need for pity. Teams is a brilliant way of conducting business, keeping in contact with colleagues, managing teams and delivering training. It will certainly reduce a lot of totally unnecessary travel post-Covid.
 
Teams is fine for meetings. I need to run courses with it sometimes with 40 people and always with up to 10 breakout rooms so smaller discussions and exercsises can take place. So on a mac the new meeting experience showing more that 9 people doesn't work, the whiteboard is not fit for purpose, sometimes chat packs up, sometime breakouts don't show video so you know people are in. The solution to this is to re-start Teams which is tricky if you are presenting. There is mega lag on share screen some people can't see share screen. I just thought if I had a microsoft machine some of this stuff would be easier.
For my purposes Zoom is very much better but we are where we are.
 
Is Zoom still a security disaster zone?

No we use it all the time. An earlier version that my wife was using did get zoom bombed with something distinctly inappropriate, but an update soon solved that issue.
We were threatened with moving to teams ('cos our Japanese Head Office is...) but except for a few senior execs who communicate with Tokyo we have stuck with Zoom. I think something like 320 people is the largest meeting group - that is when Zoom really shines and Teams looks silly.

My local virtual pub group on a Sunday night is on Teams - that is only 4 or 5 of us and works OK. Zoom calls still have better audio quality though, for me at any rate.
 
Teams is fine for meetings. I need to run courses with it sometimes with 40 people and always with up to 10 breakout rooms so smaller discussions and exercsises can take place. So on a mac the new meeting experience showing more that 9 people doesn't work, the whiteboard is not fit for purpose, sometimes chat packs up, sometime breakouts don't show video so you know people are in. The solution to this is to re-start Teams which is tricky if you are presenting. There is mega lag on share screen some people can't see share screen. I just thought if I had a microsoft machine some of this stuff would be easier.
For my purposes Zoom is very much better but we are where we are.

we've been running lectures and courses with up 300 people with Teams. Things seem to get problematic with alot of breakout rooms. We also use Zoom with our students, as we can host a class of up to 500. Although we still need to break the students into groups for some of our modules - we have two modules with 1300+ students on.
 
We use pretty much all of the virtual meeting platforms and while Zoom is pretty decent, MS Teams is the best by a country mile.

I've never used it on a Mac though! Our corporate laptops are all quite decent spec (e.g. i7's with 16GB of RAM and SSD drives) and we've no issues with lagging etc. except where it's internet bandwidth related. We've done meetings with a few hundred people on but nothing really big.
 
For those that think Teams is bad, think yourself lucky that you aren't forced to use Webex...

Teams on my windows desktop and work laptop works great, and as a remote collaboration and meeting tool I like it, but it frequently lags, hangs and restarts on my old mac mini; not a good experience. I tried disabling GPU acceleration which is a commonly suggested fix, but to be honest it's still hangs frequently, it's very frustrating and if you google the problem it's clearly not uncommon.
 
Thank god I stopped working eleven years ago. I only had to endure one (1) 'electronic' meeting (via phone, no images) where the people on the other side of the Atlantic chatted about their chritmas shopping in NY and I, finally, delivered one sentence of something not very meaningful. One hour of my life waisted.

I pity you.
Beats commuting- especially in winter
 
Beats commuting- especially in winter

I've realised how fortunate I am to have been able to work from home almost exclusively since March, and have an employer that's embracing hybrid working.

I hate those winter drives home, on dark evenings, my body doesn't do dark so I frequently find myself dangerously wandering. Add to that almost £300/month in fuel savings (and less frequent servicing) I'd happily submit to any online meeting as an alternative!

In summer the opposite will be true, I'll happily take a blast home on some twisty roads, just for fun and to hell with the fuel consumption :)
 


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