[Asooka]

> On top of that, the update process slows the rest of the system almost to a halt, because of all the hard drive activity

As far as I'm aware, that's a problem only on Linux, because Windows has a desktop-grade IO scheduler tuned to interactive usage (whereas in Linux both the CPU and IO schedulers are written for maximum throughput).

[pjc50]

Windows is quite capable of messing this one up as well; if your browser profile is on the same disk as you're doing something heavy, it'll end up blocking the browser while waiting to commit.

(Seems to be worst on Firefox)

[benchaney]

This doesn't match my experiences. Linux seems to handle this better because it has competent memory caching.

If this poses an issue anyway you could run steam using ionice.