?

Check your setting for download regions if it's slow as steam can usually cap anyone's download speeds.

I am not sure what you mean by hiding update options as there is nothing hidden about them unless you want to do something specific such as capping the download speeds on your end or setting up specific download times but they can easily be found under the download settings.

You come across as paranoid. I'm not saying Steam is a consumer wonderland, but to say they are anti-consumer is ridiculous. What benefit is there to Valve from 'hiding' updates that have been released on other platforms?

You are aware that on Steam the developer/publisher can just push updates as and when they want to? Which isn't necessarily the case with other platforms.

He could also have the issue with GPU accelration, and dual GPU card with IGPU and main card, some usre in the past menation something like 15 sec steam bootup issue.
and how knows if he also have spin drives HHD steam has move to and not SSD anymore as steam default installation check storage manager , the right drive is default.

And stop use last 200gb on every drive and pations, also know as performance drop.

any PC expert know last part , it has been this way from win7/8 OS with red bar label at drives. ( still there in win10+ )


ps.
Nothing prevent you from enter steam small mode, but most steam user don't just want a game launcher.

same goes with all steam setting reduce its usage of resources,

there are many steam user that do this use large mode with least perfomance, we also do that in windows, max performance for our games.