I've seen that claim before so I stayed away from games that had SecuROM for a while but there was one game that I really wanted and it had SecuROM so I gave up. To my surprise, nothing bad has happened to my computer in years. I haven't even formatted it in all that time. I'm still staying away from Tages and Starforce though.
Also, games that only have SecuROM can be deactivated and passed on to a friend or sold if you want. I don't buy or sell used games but I've seen a lot of people making a fuss about the death of the second hand market yet praising Steam =/

I'd call having to run a program and log into an account every time you want to play pretty hefty (and yes, you're still having to authenticate in offline mode, your games are still locked unless encrypted credentials are stored).

Starforce is more than hefty, starforce is nasty. Steam is far from lightweight though, I got much improved performance from Terraria once I cracked it.

Definitely. Though it still remains to be a turd.

Still, Skyrim is already bound to Steam. So getting mods over Steam doesn't change or add on the DRM side. Not to mention that you still can get the mods without Steam at all.

If that all isn't disputed - do we really need another thread about Steam / it's DRM? You couldn't have found another one which was already used for Steam bashi... discussing? And if you think "yes, this is important", maybe it's important enough to make a new one instead of hijacking others?

They are separate things, but I'm not aware of a service where you can get these extra features without the DRM.
Well, nope. But if I had to eat some turd, I'd rather do it with an enormous amount of mustard. :D

Oh yeah, sorry about that, I have realized it too late. I think I will now proceed to hang myself.

Have you tried running it with the windows's 3D GUI turned off by disabling "desktop composition" and "visual themes" on steam/retail version of Terraria.exe under compatibility options?

To be fair, Steam is much more than just DRM bloatware (friends, voip, match-making, overlay/browser, etc.) Steam's highest memory usage on my machine is when downloading a new game (approx. 60MB). Under normal circumstances it usually hovers around 20MB +/- 5MB. Considering low end hardware comes with at least 4GB of RAM, I would call that acceptable by today's standards.

Although it rarely affects me, I still think Steam's most legitimate criticism as a form of DRM is concerning the periodic online verification needed to keep running games in offline mode that have been previously activated and unlocked.

There was a question asked, which I answered. :P
Fair enough. If forced, I would also want large quantities of mustard, Worcestershire sauce and bovril. And maybe some wasabi.
Thanks for the tips, I'll give them a go. Although I no longer have performance problems with Terraria, this might still boost the framerate a bit more.

It'd be interesting to see if this can handle "overhauls" and other big and complex mods, and handle conflicts between mods.

I know that for Oblivion, installing mods the right way involved downloading a bunch of tools, learning how to use those tools, making sure you download any compatibility patch mods for your existing mods, making sure you installed your mods the right way, testing in-game for an hour, restarting, reconfiguring, testing again in-game for an hour, spend maybe an hour or more on some forums researching something that has (not may) gone wrong, and frustration.

Care to elaborate? How does it compare to, say, hardcore tools like Wrye Bash?

I'm as low core as it can get, I'm just happy how easy it is. Everything is explained and I don't think I can do something wrong if I tryed. I've just installed DarkUI and the better map, so no big changes (might go for that hideout once 0.4 is out).

You pretty much know how every mod manager, even more NMM that is stripped down to the very basics, compare to Wrye Bash which comes with a 50 page manual.
It also pretty much illustrates why to go with mods over Steamworks in the first place.