Can I stop Steam pausing downloads when I play games?

[8th|D: Darkfalz]

Steam pauses all my downloads when I play any game, including single player games.

This means while I am waiting while download games, I cannot play any other games.

How can I stop it doing this?

[bdmason]

1. Start downloads
2. Start game
3. Alt-tab out of game
4. In client window, right-click the games that were downloading and hit 'pause' (eventhough the downloading is already paused)
5. now go back in and click 'resume download'
6. Alt-tab back into your game.

Originally Posted by bdmason

1. Start downloads
2. Start game
3. Alt-tab out of game
4. In client window, right-click the games that were downloading and hit 'pause' (eventhough the downloading is already paused)
5. now go back in and click 'resume download'
6. Alt-tab back into your game.

It's annoying as hell, but it works.

[8th|D: Darkfalz]

Steam's crashed again mid-download. Frozen window, 50% CPU usage, just sitting there. God damn I hate it sometimes. I don't know if it's stuck in a loop or actually doing something which will eventually finish...

[defrisselle]

Hmm, my downloads always pause then I play a game.

[8th|D: Darkfalz]

It's still downloading, just frozen I'm scared to task kill it in case it reconnects and suddenly my d/l speeds are crap or what it's download gets corrupted. God damn it, why? WHY DOES IT FREEZE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME! Is it the stupid IE integration that causes it to crash? Because I use Chrome so don't update external flash/IE at all.

[8th|D: Darkfalz]

Arrghh. Task killed, restarted. Download rate cut in half.

If it gets stuck just click on the pause button a couple times to get it going again.

[PurSpyk!!]

Extremely irritating, no idea why you cannot download while playing, especially if the game you are playing is not the one being updated.

[PieceOfMind]

Originally Posted by PurSpyk!!

Extremely irritating, no idea why you cannot download while playing, especially if the game you are playing is not the one being updated.

It's just a guess, but there's a very simple possible reason Valve set up Steam to pause downloads automatically by default (noting that you can always unpause them if you wish). It ensures Steam isn't sharing bandwidth with games that may need to use the internet (not necessarily just MP games by the way!). And a smaller but perhaps still relevant reason is that Steam won't be using the hard drive (much) while the game is, possibly improving load times.

[lordofterror]

ya , i can see the reason if it stopped downloading while playing a multiplayer game but for single player game is puzzling

[rasitha_raw]

theyll probably roll out that option in the future. But for now we are stuck with alt tabbing. It usually works okay.

[DM36]

Originally Posted by bdmason

1. Start downloads
2. Start game
3. Alt-tab out of game
4. In client window, right-click the games that were downloading and hit 'pause' (eventhough the downloading is already paused)
5. now go back in and click 'resume download'
6. Alt-tab back into your game.

This method DOES work with a lot of games. But believe it or not, some games can not be alt-tabbed out of. Some games also do not start back up properly when you go back to them. Some end up crashing. Also, I've noticed with dos-box games, when you maximize the window, it goes straight to windowed mode, and this can be annoying considering how small of a resolution some older games have.

So yeah, its a good fix for a lot of games...but some games it does not work with well.

A fix for this would be very nice. Like maybe an option to pause or not when launching a game. Leave it up to the user.