I’ve heard from some teachers that Zoom does not work well on Chromebooks. While it’s true Zoom can sometimes overwhelm your Chromebook, there are several things you can do to improve your Zoom experience.
Reboot Your Chromebook
It’s been the number one question asked by the tech support field since the beginning of time. Have you tried turning it off and back on again? Asked another way, have you rebooted your device? It’s in every troubleshooting manual. One reason it has stood the test of time is because it often works to resolve the issue. This holds true for using Zoom on a Chromebook too.
Rebooting or shutting down your Chromebook is not the same as closing the Chromebook lid. Typically closing the lid just puts the Chromebook to sleep which helps with battery life.
To completely turn off your Chromebook, make sure it is on and then:
Hold the power button down until the screen goes completely black. Then press the power button again to turn it back on OR
You can quick reboot (turn off > turn on) your Chromebook by pressing the power button followed by the reload button. The reload button is typically above the number keys and looks like a circle that ends with an arrow. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.
The whole process, from shutdown to logon screen should take less than 15 seconds.
Chances are you open multiple tabs in Chrome on your Chromebook. You may even have multiple Chrome windows open, whether you realize it or not. Most of us don’t turn off our Chromebooks when we are finished with them. We just close the lid. The next time you use your Chromebook, you likely don’t close everything out. Even without all of the tabs, windows, and apps open on your Chromebook, there are likely background processes running that you don’t even realize, and why would you. All of this stuff is using your Chromebooks’s memory and CPU. Often this doesn’t leave much room for a CPU intensive program like Zoom.
So before your Zoom meeting, reboot your Chromebook. If Chrome asks if you want to restore the webpages you previously had opened, say no. You weren’t looking at most of them anymore anyway.
While in your Zoom meeting only open websites, docs, and other applications that you will NEED during the Zoom meeting. Remember each one uses at least a little memory and CPU. The more tabs that are open the less memory and CPU power Zoom will have to work with.
Turn Off All of Those Wonderful Extensions
If you’ve been using a Chromebook for a while, you undoubtedly have accumulated a lot of useful extensions. However, you don’t need those extensions running all the time. Like websites and apps, extensions use your Chromebooks memory (RAM) just by running in the background. The good news is, you don’t need to uninstall those extensions that you have spent years gathering. You can turn them off by going to chrome://extensions. Just slide the blue button to the left to turn off any extension.
There are likely some extensions that you cannot turn off. These extensions are probably being pushed by the technology department. The slide bar to turn off this extension is greyed out.
If these steps do not solve your audio or video problems, please reach out to the technology department by dialing extension 123.
