Improving Steam Client Performance

Steam is awesome. It keeps all my games organised, makes it easy to play with my friends, lets me buy games for cheap and has a library of information about the games I like.

The client also tends to run like a dog.

Or at least, it did. Read on to find out how a average man sped up Steam with one simple trick! Origin marketers hate him!

It really is a simple change. The Steam client is in many ways a glorified web browser and you can access most of the information directly from the web. If you disable the check for proxies on your system it speeds up Steam performance dramatically.

Normally a browser only tries to auto-detect proxy server settings when it first starts so I can only guess that Steam fires up a new mini-browser whenever you click on a link. It then waits to see if it can detect a proxy before carrying on. As I don’t use a proxy to access the Internet this is just a waste of time.

I disabled the setting and Steam positively flies.

The only people who can’t use this are people who rely on a proxy to access to the internet AND don’t have it explicitly defined in their settings. I’m fairly sure that’s pretty much nobody but be aware.

To disable proxy server auto-detection;

First open Internet Options, either from within Tools in Internet Explorer or from with Control Panel. This will be in slightly different places depending on your OS etc but the initial window should look like this;

Click on the Connections tab;