Spring RTS Engine

when i had a friend over the other week for some lan, he kept having a recurring problem with his computer; i doubt it's related to spring, but perhaps you can point me in the right direction as to what the problem is.

we would get about 5 to 7 minutes into a game (tried chickens with just the two of us, as well as partaking in a 6v6 BA game) and his computer would all of a sudden start lagging to hell, accompanied with a wwwWWWWWZZZZZZZZZZZIZIZIZIZIZIZIZIZZZZZZZZzzzz noise that grew in intensity until it was almost as loud as the game sounds coming out of my speakers. he stayed connected, and could issue commands (as well as you can at 1fps anyways), but the lag did not cease; even when spring was shut down the computer kept zwwzzwzwzwzwzwzing at us; and his windows performance was ridiculously slow until cold-booting.

AFAIK that was the first day that ever happened; but it kept occuring consistently over the period of about five games. what might be wrong with his computer? screwed up gizmo in the HD? or something else? dell inspiron notebook, single core. thx in advance.

btw windows task manager showed only about 3% cpu load after closing spring and nothing out of the ordinary lurking in the processes list, which is why hardware seems the likely culprit.

the ZZZZT is most likely a fan speeding up as the computer senses that something is heating up. Though something may not feel like its using up a process after closing the game, most likely, your CPU is heating up as it tries to load the object that slows your computer down. This is a common blunder of a firewall, which very commonly has problems with Router and LAN based programs unless you configure it right...OR it might be an antivirus trying to stop the operation and counting it as a hack...AVG does this often to me and my only solution is to uninstall it because almost all commercial antivirus sucks as they do things to your computer which even an administrator can't change such as cutting off complete rights to a file.

Get the side of the case off, see what's making the noise. Most likely a dying/jammed fan on the CPU or graphics card. Component overheats, performance dies.

thx for the suggestions and diagnosis; it's a laptop so it's not too easy to just open up and check, but that makes a lot of sense what you guys said about the fans & overheating. the computer is a few years old, so that makes perfect sense.

firewalls and antivirus were disabled, that was my first idea of why the performance dropped like that.

hopefully he doesnt get raped too hard for replacement parts...

If it's a laptop then it's doubly likely its a heat issue - laptops have everything a lot closer together with less space for cooling.

get one of those laptop fan base thingys

laptops are notorious for overheating

indeed. or elevate the base off the tabletop an inch or so. i ran into the same problem with my old man's lappy overheating. a plastic coke bottle lid under each corner alleviated the problem 90% of the time