schmitty wrote on Jun 26
th, 2012 at 7:10am:
But the second argument holds no water at all. On a modern machine (meaning 3-4 years old) you can't even tell Steam is running in the background.
Sorry my machine is $DDO years old
( Pentium D 930 )
But anyway, enough bloatwares stuffed into that bar and you will feel it, trust me.
I have a 1 year old laptop for work... and a list of bloat/crap/shit/fuckware that runs in the background ( ranging from Child Porn hunter to Full Hard Disk Encryption with fun stuff like some Citrix client, LAN/WLAN control [ when LAN OFF WLAN ON, WLAN OFF LAN ON, no you can't have both up at hte same time, So long ] ) and well, even without Steam I cringe when I have to do some heavy duty things on it. I've stopped counting the times I've just Alt-Ctrl-Del -> Process Manager -> Kill the fucking process that makes it go at a snail rate.
Just the Hard Disk Encryption kills about 30% of performances...
To give an idea : right now I have IE opened on the Vault ( 4 Tabs ), Thunderbird, a Media Player playing "Asia - Holy War", and an excel sheet ( nothing frilly in excel, just plain tabs filled with stuff and lots of colors )... the Memory used is 1.92 Gb ( I whined enough to be entrusted with 4Gb on that fucking laptop... all the others have to make do with 2Gb... which they fill by just opening Outlook. )