I totally understand anyone not liking Steam for whatever reason or if they don't want to use it (even for no reason in particular), but your situation is far from normal. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, but unless something's really screwed up on your computer or you've discovered a really strange bug that only shows up under unusual circumstances, Steam itself uses almost zero CPU time and generally well under 100MB of RAM, even less if you don't use the browser and disable the in-game overlay and stuff like that.Uber Waddles said:
If your computer and Internet connection are on the slow side, it can take it a minute for games to actually start up as it verifies/authenticates things and checks for updates, but that shouldn't affect anything once you're actually in the game, because it doesn't actually do anything after that point. If you're playing a single player game, you can skip all of that by running Steam in offline mode, which speeds that part up significantly.
And actually, as far as things that might have an affect while you're playing a game, have you tried disabling the in-game overlay? There's a setting in the Steam preferences to turn all that stuff off globally for every game. It usually works fine for most people, but it's sometimes buggy with some games or has had conflicts with certain versions of video card drivers over the years or other programs that use their own overlays like X-Fire. I had to turn it off on my laptop, just because my laptop's so slow to start out with, but I otherwise don't notice a difference between Steam and non-Steam games.
If you've already tried all those kinds of things and it still doesn't work, I guess you're the "lucky" winner of something really weird going on.
