Any question answered...

Well that sucks.

It was really dismally bad. Worse than Skype by far. I've never used it for video before so I don't know what to compare it to but it's not something I would be rushing to use again based on that. I've since tried here with a friend elsewhere in Brighton - still shit. I've also moved and connected at a different location (in case it was my connection) and still shit.

I use videoconferencing heavily, Adobe, Cisco-Webex, Microsoft, Readytalk, Google, and more recently Zoom.

Microsoft (Lync/Skype for biz) is the only one that's truly bad, and that's from a "I fucking hate using this and having to download the client every single fucking time" perspective, the quality of the video and the audio is on-par with the others.

But - they all have the same Achilles heel, and that's bandwidth - if I was running my own company I'd immediately choose Google Hangouts as it's intuitive and works very well. The only slight pain is that you can't share a Powerpoint deck in presentation mode - you have to upload it as a Google Presentation, but that's not a show-stopper once you know it's a restriction.

I'd blame your clients connection, and then something being wrong with your laptop, in that order. If both of you are on the end of a connection with a decent upload speed (check this!) then you'll be fine with hangouts.