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Posted on February 26, 2021, by Jonah Cohen(2022)
Chromebooks work. Well for most things, but multitasking is not its strongest suit. Most computers have to use better hardware to be faster. Chromebooks, however, are optimised for the tasks they need to perform like editing Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and browsing the web. When this optimization was made, it was back in 2017 before COVID-19. The operating system is designed for just productivity and light entertainment tasks. This is a problem in an age where we need our computers to do more than just web browsing, writing documents, and making presentations.
This is a problem when we need to be on Zoom and also working. In my own experience, whenever I open a Chrome tab on my chromebook while using Zoom, audio and video would lag for others to the point where no one would understand what I am saying. Luckily there is a solution. In the chrome browser there are experimental features. If you type “chrome://flags” in the url bar, you will look for “WebRTC hardware video decoding” and “WebRTC hardware video encoding”. These are 2 experimental features that are enabled by default that caused some problems with Zoom that make the graphics card process the video. To do this, just click on the box next to the feature and select the disable option. After that, the chromebook will need to restart.
The problem was that the integrated graphics card on most Chromebooks are slow compared to the graphics card in the latest mid-range windows laptop. But there was a twist. Due to the optimization, the operating system gives the limited RAM to the CPU. In other words, the operating system is telling the CPU to not share. The problem is that the graphics have to share RAM with the rest of the system and since it can’t do that, the GPU would be slower. That was the root of my problem and with this fix, that problem is gone.
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