Question
Zoom Causes Network "Crash" for Specific Dell Laptops
We have three employees who all recently got Dell XPS 13 9310 2-in-1 laptops. No one else in the company has these laptops.
This is how to replicate the issue:
- User has a Dell XPS 13 9310 2-in-1 laptop with Windows 10 21H1 with updated OS, drivers and firmware.
- User with the above laptop joins a meeting with audio and video (webcam).
- User unmutes and begins to talk.
- The problem begins within 3 seconds of the user talking or transmitting audio.
- This has also been replicated when a user shares a web page with a video. As soon as both audio and video transmitted the problem occurs. It doesn't matter if the video and audio are coming from a webcam+mic or a video being shared.
Characteristics of the problem:
- From the perspective of the other attendees - the affected user unmutes, says a few words, and then their video freezes and audio stops.
- From the perspective of the affected user
- ~3 seconds into sending audio and video the Zoom client becomes unresponsive (mouse clicks don't register within the application), but Windows never detects the application has "no responding". So no application crashes are logged in the Windows Application Event Log.
- As soon as the Zoom client becomes unresponsive, all network traffic to/from the affected laptop is halted. The laptop can ping it's IP and the loopback address, but not it's local gateway.
- At around 10 seconds into the problem, the Zoom window closes, and the smaller, index-card-sized Zoom startup window pops up with the loading indicator spinning.
- At 10~20 seconds into the Zoom loading window, network traffic is resumed. The gateway and other network and Internet IPs become pingable again.
- Another ~10 seconds (roughly 30-40 seconds into the problem) and the Zoom window reopens re-joining the meeting where the issue occurred.
Things we have tried:
- Connecting to various different networks both wired and wireless
- Updating all device drivers and firmware
- Reinstalling Zoom
- Reinstalling Windows
- Switching out USB docking stations using different makes and models
- Switching different audio and video devices although it doesn't matter the source of the video and audio
I suspect this is a problem with a codec or some other compress issue, but I never see a driver or application crash logged in the Windows event viewer. It's as if the Zoom client halts ALL network traffic while it restarts from being able to handle the audio and video.
Again, this ONLY happens with the Dell XPS 13 9310 2-in-1 laptops. We have a myriad of different users on different hardware including other Dell laptops, but these users on these laptops are having this issue.
Any help is GREATLY appreciated.