Boiling over, with too much Steam.

Just a quick post to say how much I dislike the Steam system from Valve. Half Life 2 is such a good game, but my son will look everywhere for mods and we do get regularly hit by swathes of spyware etc although we have a separate firewall and anti virus kits installed. The machine eventually succumbed to the pressure and I had to reinstall a few things. The Steam software was such a nightmare. Trying to prove who we were so that we could connect again took more than a week! Keeping track of passwords is not something that young games players consider a priority. Having bought the game on-line it should have been a quick email at most. Other people can do it almost instantly by sending emails to the original buyer. But not Valve/Steam. They had to do this manually and took several days at each stage. It may not have helped that we are not part of the USA. It can be done more quickly there, apparently.

What a compltely opposite feeling to how good the game software is. It was such a frustrating time, with kids waiting to play and not understanding why it should be so difficult, and the other dreaded feeling that you know that they are going to trash the machine again at some point in the not too distant future!