Is there a way to limit Steam's downloading speed?

[Zenoth]

Hello.

I am currently downloading just one game from my library as I am typing this, and it had been a while since I hadn't done that, but I just recalled as I watch the downloading speed right now that basically my whole downloading bandwidth capacity is being taken by that single download. I had that "issue" before, in fact it's always been the case for as far as I can remember. It is good to have great services and assuring that whatever I download will be ready as soon as my own connection's capacity allows it, but I don't exactly want to play Solitaire on my Desktop while Steam does its job and forces me to stay away from the web in the meantime, especially when the game is big and takes hours to download even at my maximum speed (which in itself isn't very good by today's standards I'm aware, but that's what I can afford).

Whenever I download something on Steam then it automatically goes at full throttle speed, at which point I pretty much cannot do anything else whilst using the Internet, otherwise I have minutes-long lag spikes for merely trying to access any given web sites. For instance, actually logging-in to this forum to type this as the game downloads took me a good seven or eight minutes approximately. I usually like to go on YouTube to burn some time and watch random videos, but doing so while Steam downloads anything is practically unbearable due to the waiting times. Additionally, you can imagine that playing another on-line focused game (for instance MMORPGs or multi-player focused games such as Team Fortress 2) is completely out of question.

So, my questions are as follows:

1) Is there any in-Steam [official] feature that I'm simply not aware of that allows Steam users to manually limit the speed at which Steam downloads games?

2) If not, then is there any known and reliable third-party software that I might want to give a try to that would allow me to do just that?

Thanks.

[Skyrider]

As far as I know, there's no "official" way to do this through steam. Which is quite a shame in my opinion. But nothing that third-party software can't do:

http://seriousbit.com/netbalancer/

Perhaps this might help you. The free version however, has some limitations:

*The Free version is limited to a maximum of 5 process priorities/limits and 5 rules at a time, has no separate network adapters management and no support for Network Grouping.
Some other limits may apply until we take a look here and update this text.

Seeing you would only limit steam, which should only use 1 process.

You could also try this free software:
http://bandwidthcontroller.com/trafficShaperXp.html

While it says it's meant for Win2000 / XP, according to a few posts it seems to work for Windows 7 (if you have that installed). So it's worth checking it out.

Regards,
Skyrider