According to my battery usage monitor, the app used up 35% of my battery over the course of 3 minutes as I walked from my apartment to where I work (for clarification, this is not typical or a small amount of battery that we're talking about. I have a pretty beefy laptop that I use for intense lab work and image processing software that doubles as my personal gaming laptop. It usually can last up to 8 or 9 hours of battery capacity for games/work without needing to recharge). I do not see a setting to disable this app's background usage. Any ideas from the community? I think I can change my laptop's settings to have it sleep when I close, but I enjoy not having to reload my other apps (which do allow me to disable background usage when I close my laptop screen), so if I can circumvent that it would be great.

Uninstall the bloody thing : )

You do not need it to play your games.

Uninstall it or stop it from booting up when Windows starts.

Disable All Startup Programs using the MSConfig

Open the Run window by pressing Win + R on the keyboard.
In the Run text box, type msconfig.
To open MSConfig, click the OK button.
To disable this feature, uncheck the Load startup items checkbox on the General tab. You will go service>hide all MS and look for galaxy.
To save the updated boot settings, click Apply and select the OK button.
On the dialogue box prompt, click Restart

There should also be startup tab in MSconfig to let you disable apps from booting up on startup. This is different from stopping services from starting.

You can also pull up the task manager, and forcibly kill the process.

Windows XP/7 you'd right click on the task bar and select task manager.

Not sure the exact method on 8/10/11, but press ALT+CTRL+DELETE, the screen will instantly lock, and you get like 5 options, one option is to access the task manager, which will open up. Find the galaxy program and forcibly kill it.

Though i think uninstalling is a better option.