Steam
 

every time i open it, it downloads this "update" and i have no idea whatsoever wtf this is.

i dont like downloading updates/patches blindly, and steam is making this compulsory. what a bunch of bastards.

the suspicious thing is, it cant seem to dl the update when my firewall is turned on.

anyone else facing any issues like this?

I'm assuming you already told your firewall to give steam access to the net?

If you didnt... why are you running steam in the first place?

I'm not sure I understand the whole steam thing. I've been using it a lot lately though. I never played multiplayer HL at all until I got it. Sometimes it doesn't seem to work very well at all. Sometimes it won't connect to any servers, but this is rare. The only thing I don't like about it at all is how it slows down my computer when it starts in windows. I could probably take it out of the startup. Does anybody know if it will still work okay if I do this?

It should work fine if you take it out of startup... just as long as you run it whenever you wanna play HL online (after upgrading to CS1.6, it's pretty much impossible to play HL online without steam though)

I took it out of startup last night and once again my PC loads up fast as hell. I was amazed at how much steam bogged it down at startup. When I want to play I just open it normally and it works fine. I tried playing HL multiplayer by connecting through gamespy and the whole experience confused the hell out of me when the game actually opened. I couldn't figure out how to change the settings or get to the video options, or to change my name. I assume you have to use the console for that stuff when not using steam. Too complicated for my newbie mind. I'll stick to steam. :D