yeah at the time you were forced into it. the won servers were shut down and most peoples computers werent good enough to play CS and have this clunky software running in the background at the same time. it worked but alt-tabbing back then was a gong show and you definitely had the performance hit.
i played CS daily then so the first day was a shit show and I dont think I got much time in that day. mostly just trying to get connected…the servers were overloaded.