If Teams is making your fan spin up, your laptop run hot, or your whole system feel sluggish whenever it's open, this is a common enough complaint that there are several well-established fixes worth working through.

Ad placeholder — in-article responsive unit

Fix 1: confirm you're on the new Teams client

Microsoft rebuilt Teams' underlying architecture specifically to address performance complaints with the original client — the newer version uses significantly less memory and CPU. If you're still on the classic Teams client for any reason, switching is the single biggest improvement available:

  1. In classic Teams, look for a toggle labeled "Try the new Teams" near the top of the app and switch it on
  2. If you don't see this option, your organization may have it disabled via policy — check with IT, since they may need to enable the rollout

Fix 2: clear the Teams cache

A bloated or corrupted cache can drag down performance over time:

  1. Fully close Teams
  2. Press Windows key + R, type %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams (or for new Teams, %localappdata%\Packages\MSTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache), press Enter
  3. Delete the contents
  4. Reopen Teams and sign back in

Fix 3: disable GPU hardware acceleration (counterintuitively)

While GPU acceleration is generally meant to improve performance, on certain hardware/driver combinations it can actually cause Teams to use more resources than expected, or contribute to instability:

  1. Profile picture → Settings → General
  2. Try toggling Disable GPU hardware acceleration and see if performance actually improves — this varies by system, so it's worth testing rather than assuming

Fix 4: check what's actually running in the background

Teams runs background processes even when the window is closed (so it can deliver notifications), which is normal — but check Task Manager to see whether it's behaving reasonably:

  1. Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc)
  2. Look for multiple Teams-related processes and note the CPU/memory column — brief spikes during calls or screen sharing are normal, but persistent high usage while idle is not
  3. If usage stays persistently high even when Teams is just sitting in the background doing nothing, a full restart of Teams (not just minimizing) often resolves a stuck background process

Fix 5: limit Teams' startup behavior

Teams launching automatically at every Windows startup, combined with many other startup apps, compounds overall system slowness — even if Teams itself isn't the main culprit:

  1. Go to Settings → Apps → Startup
  2. Find Teams and consider toggling it off if you don't need it running immediately at every login — you can still open it manually when needed

If it's specifically slow during calls/meetings, not generally

This points more toward camera/video processing load rather than a general Teams performance issue — try turning off your own video during calls where you don't need to be seen, and ask others to do the same in larger meetings, since each active video feed adds meaningful processing load, particularly on older hardware.