Using Google Meet for teaching with MS Edge

In an earlier post, I said that Google Meet seems to use a lot of systems resources. Accordingly, the PC fan often comes on during a session, and at the fastest speed, so is quite noisy. Well, from around the world wide web, it seems like this is a major problem, even for high-end machines. The screen is jittery, the mouse drags its feet around the screen and there are those annoying screen freezes of two or three seconds. Of course, for machines with fans, the noise is too distracting, and fan-less machines can become overheated. 

Salvation. I have just found out (from a forum) that the best way to use Google Meet is not to use the Google Chrome browser. As a Windows devotee, I would use Microsoft Edge, but Safari and Opera are also good. I ran Google Meet in Edge and found it to be an excellent experience. I hosted an online class with full video, shared Libre Office WP screens (with scrolling), shared HTML pages, shared video, used the whiteboard and sent messages. The fan did not come on once and everything was smooth and responsive. I did check out the Windows resource monitor a couple of times during the session and found that CPU usage did not exceed 70%, and was mostly around 40%.

I am sure those master programmers at Google will correct the situation soon but we no longer need to wait for them to do it.

Setting up my laptop for Zoom

My portable PC for online teaching is no longer portable. It is on its own little table. It never moves.

I have plugged into it the following;

A Sony webcam - plugged into a USB port

A four-port USB hub, with a USB mouse, keyboard and speaker power connection. I also plug in a USB drive if needed for a lesson

A 4Mb USB drive configured as "readyboost". I have read varying reports about whether this is useful, but when connecting to Zoom it seems to help.

A high resolution 22" monitor. This is a lifesaver.

A pair of speakers plugged into the jack port.

A LAN connection - RJ45.

A 64Gb SD card which holds all my live data files.

Actually, my laptop is acting like a Zoom server for the various peripherals I need to conduct a lesson. 

This seems quite reasonable to me. What do you think?