Check your gear before the call starts

How the device tests work

Which test do you need?

People on a call say they cannot see you: start with the webcam test, which gives a readiness score for resolution, frame rate and light. They say you sound far away, quiet or crackly: the mic test listens for five seconds and tells you which of those it is, with playback so you hear what they hear. You cannot hear them: the speaker test plays a tone through each channel, so you know the right output is selected.

For hardware rather than calls, the keyboard test catches keys that type twice, keys that drop when others are held, and keys that never register. The mouse test checks every button and the wheel and catches a switch that double-clicks on its own. The dead pixel test fills the screen with flat colours that make stuck pixels and backlight bleed easy to see. Buying a laptop, new or used, the laptop check walks through all of it in one list.

What happens to your camera and microphone

Each test runs inside your browser tab. The browser asks before the page can use your camera or microphone, and the video and sound are analysed on your device. Nothing you test is uploaded, and there is no account to make. Close the tab and the permission ends with it.

What a browser cannot tell you

A browser sees what the operating system hands it. It cannot read battery health, disk health or temperatures, and it shows the most keys it saw held at once, which can be lower than a keyboard's real limit. Where a result has a limit like that, the test says so next to the result instead of guessing.