I bought the humble bundle and added them to my steam library. I dl'd 2 of them. During the time when the download is happening, all audio, no matter what the source is (audio, video, internet, avi etc), all went to shit and was slow and robotic sounding. The general performance of my computer went to garbage as well. Pausing the download leads to a normal behavior by my computer. This is definitely not the first time I have downloaded large games from steam while I did other cpu demanding things and I have never experienced this phenomenon. I just wanted to know if someone else was experiencing this? this is a first for me.

I am running windows 7, I have a 2nd gen i5 (laptop). I did quick tests like downloading a large file thru chrome and stressing my harddrive with a defrag(not the most exhaustive test) and both resulted in favourable behaviour. As far as I can tell this is isolated to steam. Was there an update that caused this?

I would appreciate solutions but I am here mainly to see if others are having similar issues?

11 years ago*

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I would imagine this is something to do with your anti-virus screwing up from the high traffic. Which are you using?

11 years ago
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(for the record, I experienced this with BullGuard a couple of years back. High internet traffic messed up my PC's sound, and I had to go into my Creative control panel, change speaker set up from 5.1 to 2, and then change back again, and my sound was restored)

11 years ago
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avast, also I still use a firewall (zonealarm).
I never considered the antivirus, I will turn both off and try another download to see and report back.

11 years ago
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Avast is ok, it may be zonealarm.

11 years ago
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actually, I disabled both and I got great results, problem was gone. I then reactivated each one separately and the slowdown appears. Right now avast is on and there is a slight slow down but no where near what I was dealing with before. Leaving on zonealarm seems to be good and smooth.
Right now the culprit seems to be avast.

Edit: I plan to uninstall avast with their "tool", then reinstall and see if that solves the problem.

11 years ago
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How much RAM do you have? Also, which version number of Avast are you running and what version of it if applicable?

11 years ago
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I have 6gbs of ram and I am running version 8.0.4.1489. It is the current one, the free edition.

11 years ago
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Seeing this happen to other people as well i "may" know what the problem is.
Using an antivirus or other programs that have real time protection, while downloading games or programs that have a lot of files gives a big performance drop.
The problem here is your hard disk is already doing a lot of work moving/adding a lot of files, then there is the antivirus that starts checking them as well which either fills your hard disk buffer or keeps it really really busy.

This has happened with other games that have REALLY A LOT of files.I don't know if any games in the bundle do,but there are games that have more than 6k data files.
The real problem here is the real time protection ,if any,that gives too much strain on your hdd/ram( so one workaround you could do is disable temporarily the real time protection,but leaving on your antivirus )

11 years ago
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Avast lets you label entire folders as untouched by the antivirus. It will not scan anything inside, and will not scan anything from inside when it is loaded into ram. It will still scan anything outside of that folder if it's trying to alter files inside that folder.

Since you won't be likely to get a virus from anything downloaded from Steam, consider putting all of your Steam files and folders on the exclude list.

11 years ago
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I went to add steam folder to the exclusion list but apparantly I already did this at one point in the past because "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam*" was in the exclusions list. Now I am even more confused as to why avast would be slowing me down.

11 years ago
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Ok, so I downloaded Saints row 3 and Sacred gold 2. I then tested with Hitman absolution, and I can remember specifically not having this issue when I installed it the first time.

I have a new harddrive, the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid btw.

11 years ago
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Oh, I think the hybrid could be limiting your read/write speeds. Anyone can confirm this?

11 years ago
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I used to have issues like that. Then I got a computer that could handle it. :D

11 years ago
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Could be your HDD being maxxed out from downloading/extracting the games.

11 years ago
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I don't think so.

11 years ago
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Try disabling only zonealarm and see how that goes.

11 years ago
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I have had the same before, its likely your HDD maxing out(I never did go try to find the reason)
(to note before I had no anti-virus to conflict as all I use is Malware Bytes free(I practice safe and smart browsing))

I think steam does more than download at once
EDIT: to note, it was any time that steam was downloading something that my computer slowed to unusable levels(even simple stuff like playing solitaire became a chore for the system)

11 years ago
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Do you have your windows experience test enabled? That's the thing that runs all of your hardware to hell and back so you can get a score out of 10 on that page. Make sure that's disabled or it will automatically run at the worst of times to stress test your system.

11 years ago
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Really? I'm sure mine has never run without me going to the page and asking it to.

11 years ago
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Mine was set to run at 03:00 once a week or something crazy like that. I would wonder why everything started to slow down/die at 100% use until I checked the processes and found that there.

11 years ago
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Wow, I thought the title was an allusion to impotency in geek terms....

11 years ago
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Closed 11 years ago by Dustingvitamins.