Getting poor WiFi/Google Meet performance on Acer Spin 713 8 GB model

RangerKnight

This weekend I bought my daughter a Chromebook for virtual school as my wife's old Mac Book Air was not doing so well.  The Spin 713 looked really good, particularly that it had more than the typical 4 GB of RAM that you see on most Chromebooks these days.  But this entire week we've had some issues coming up and I'm at a loss to figure out what the solution is.

First, she's doing her virtual school at a friend's house.  It's just her, her Best Friend, and her Best Friend's Sister logging in for classes.  The router is in a closet right near them.  The other girls have no problems, nor do the other students (many of whom are on school issued Chromebooks that have lesser specs).

My daughter is having problems with Google Meet, which is where they do most of the teaching every day.  She's unable to see her classmates (sees the first letter of their name) or teacher much of the time.  And when she can see things the video is freezing quite a bit.

At first I thought that it might be some of the spyware type stuff that the district IT puts into the configuration.  I had signed her in initially under her school ID and that put their Chrome configuration in place.  When we were seeing issues on Monday and then again on Tuesday (after I'd looked at things on Monday evening) I decided to wipe the system, give her a separate Google ID, and then log in using the apps that school uses.

Today I agreed to hang out after she started school so that I could observe performance and see if I could see anything obvious.  I saw all of the issues that had been described happening and could find nothing to fix it.  The last thing that I tried was logging  in through Chrome instead of through the applications and that had no benefit.

I'm a bit at the end of my rope here.  On the bright side, vacation just started today.  But I'm hoping that I can fix this before the new year.

So, any ideas on settings that I can change?  Thanks!

StevenGen

Look at Google Meet troubleshooting guide here: Troubleshoot Meet network, audio, and video issues - Google Workspace Admin Help as there could be numerous problems. Diagnose and systematically omit all aspects of their troubleshooting. Its very hard to specifically tell you what is wrong as it could be a  latency, video and/or network problems. 

billsey

Also try some testing with other apps and uses. Try logging into the Zoom meeting and watching a YouTube video. The easiest issue to diagnose would be something like a disconnected antenna wire for the WiFi, that would present with connection issues that get better by moving closer to the router and get worse by moving away.

NatiK

Doing a wifi speed test comparison against my 2017 Pixelbook I'm getting 2.5 slower latency, and half of the bandwidth. Which makes it somewhat unusable.

billsey

@NatiK do you have exactly the same model as the original poster? It would be easier to help if you started your own thread, using the Ask a Question button, and included your full model number (something like CP713-xxx-xxxx), what you are seeing and what you have tried so far.