I'm going for a "whatever else your heart desires" and say that I have a deeply rooted hatred for the following:
Bananas
Asparagus
Beetroot
Reality TV
Most other TV
Morons

Oh, Reality TVs suck! Seriously, most of stuff aired there... Who cares?! And who'd like morons anyway?

Is funny how it sounds "asparagus". xD
I'm sorry in spanish is "esparrago" and I just found it funny.

wow. Is steam windows 7 compatible yet? Or have we found the worlds more unlucky Steam user.
- I can download all of half-life2 in about 10 minutes.
- I have no steam background process running (except when playing games). Have you removed it from the startup folder (or whatever they have on windows 7)?
- I've never had any unwanted invitations to join groups. I thought the communities thing was turned off by default?
- Steam creates startup menu icons for all your games. Try copying the icon to your desktop - instant desktop icon! tada!
- I haven't had steam crash since about 2 years ago.
If you haven't connected to steam in a long time its bound to take a while to update... same thing if i haven't connected to the web in ages, but AV has to download all the updates.
Some tips:
- go to File->Settings and then the Friends tab. Turn off "automatically sign in" and anything else you don't want.
- go to the interface tab and turn off "run automatically". also you can turn off new game notifications here. Stick with the default flat skin if you want to save resources.
- don't enable "steam community in-game" in the in-game tab.
- you can right click any game, choose "properties" and disable updates.
Steam is currently using 10mb of memory and 0%cpu on my system. This seems pretty constant.

Just wondering, would there be any noticeable problems with running both Steam and Impulse? I'm considering to get Impulse, because of some of the games there, and I'm just wondering if they will be have nicely, though I suspect it shouldn't matter. I've also heard that you do not need Impulse running while playing the games, is that correct?

It doesn't matter, I have both

I laughed so hard at the comment that Steam was malware. Oh please.
I have run Steam on about 5 different computers, with Win98, Vista, and XP. I've never had a problem with system resources, download speeds, or anything else for that matter. Steam doesn't force you to do anything unreasonable, to my mind, and it's interface is very friendly. I even like the default black skin.
You can make shortcuts for your games and put them on your desktop or in your Start menu, by the way.
Bottom line is if there's a game you want to play badly enough, you should play it regardless of the wrapper it comes in. Pirating is bogus and cheats hard-working people out of money. Considering you never even have to really look at the Steam client to play your Steam-based games, it's really not that big of a deal.

That is correct, you only need to run Impulse when you install games, or update them. Its not needed any time else.

Ah, OK.
Thanks, Fenixp and Shadowdragoon.

I love both of them.

I'm just wondering, since it was brought up in another topic: Does anyone know if there is a point to Steam's regional restrictions?

so that developers don't get screwed out of selling a game for what an appropriate price is in one region, only to have it be activated in another region for what would be considerably less money.
for example, $50 L4D in U.S. but $30 L4D in albania.

Albanians are poor and their money is worth less than American money, to them $30 albanian is very expensive.

What and use logic and be fair on top of that?