Steam Question

General Forums Off-topic Chat
#1

I want Portal. I want it quite badly. I don’t want the entire Orange Box. This brings me to Steam. The catch is, my gaming/blending PC does not go online. The only PC I have that can go online is my laptop. It’s not powerful enough for games and it only has hispeed when I’m on campus using the public networks. So here’s the catch: what I want to do is download the game over the public networks on campus, then go home and transfer the game to my regular box. Possible?

Also, my laptop is running low on HD space (not sure why, time to reinstall Windows I guess), so I’ll probably have to download the game onto an external. I assume there is also a good way to do this?

#2

Do you have a flash drive or an external HD? This, I think, would be the way to go.

#3

You can have steam on up to 3 computers at once if I am not mistaken, install steam on your laptop, and register the keycode, then you will be able to download it on any computer on you account.
The only catch is that you cannot have more than one steam account open at once. and your game system needs to be online. (I think you can get a cheap LAN ethernet adapter for around $8.)

It is possible to “dasy chain” your systems too, so you can network your game system to the laptop, and have the laptop as the gateway if you do not want to buy a hub.

I know it is possible to back up games you download too, so you might be able to transfer the files to your game system via CD or DVD… steam must be online though to activate and validate all games files.

Good luck, Portal is really an innovative game I had a lot of fun with it. I would like to see more non-trigger pumping games in the future.

#4

Yes, I backup my games and move them from PC to PC a lot. Thats probably going to be the best way to go.

#5

whats steam?

http://members.chello.nl/e.stroetinga/images/midwinter%20steam%20at%20speed.jpg

#6

You have to use the internet to be able to download games. Unless you just use a free dial-up service for your PC, you’ll just have to buy the whole rigamaroll.

By the way, I have portal and I just love it. Best game ever!

#7

Afaik you can run your steam account offline, AFTER you have connected to steam online at least once (you have to do this to install it). My suggestion would be:

  • download portal at campus, then save it as a file (you can do this in steam).
  • Put this file on your desktop.
  • Get your desktop somewhere where you can connect to the net.
  • Connect to your steam account, install the game from the file.
  • Go offline and make sure everything works (File -> Go Offline).

I used to run steam offline a lot, and it worked fine for me.

#8

What a runaround! I guess I’ve been spoiled by indie games…

#9

Yeah, valve doesn’t seem to care much about people who don’t have internet.