Steam requires a big fast hard drive if used regularly. This is especially true for all those online games like Counter Strike Source, Team Fortress 2 or Age of Conan that you can purchase at Steam. New maps, patches and multimedia content fill the hard drive over time.

If you are almost at the capacity you might want to move Steam to another hard drive. It could also be that you purchased a faster hard drive and want to make sure that Steam is running on the fastest hardware for maximum effectiveness. Thankfully though moving Steam to another hard drive is not as complicated as it sounds. These are the steps you need to follow:

• Exit Steam
• Copy the steamapps folder that contains all the game data like saves and downloaded contents to another location. The folder is usually located in the Steam root directory.
• Uninstall Steam
• Install Steam on the new hard drive
• Copy the steamapps folder into the new location
• Start Steam. Steam will automatically recognize the steamapps contents and make them available again

The process should not take that long as all the big game related files do not have to be downloaded again. Another unofficial version is floating around the Internet. According to it only the file clientregistry.blob has to be deleted on the computer system. It is after that only a matter of moving the complete Steam folder to the desired location. Steam will automatically repair the shortcuts and entries so that it can be used from that location as usual.

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The default value is 0 which seems to reduce the sharpness of the textures somehow. Changing that to the value -0.9 which is the lowest value that you can choose without being kicked from servers that are protected against cheating is effecting the graphic quality of the game tremendously.

If you have troubles opening the console try the following: Right-click on Team Fortress 2 in Steam and select properties. Add -console to the launch options. This opens the console by default and will bring it back whenever you hit escape in the game to see the menu.

Take a look at some of the before after screenshots to see what I mean:

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You need a software called GFCScape to do this. It’s just a small application that requires the Windows .net Framework 2 to run. Run GFCScape after installing it and click on File > Open in the menu. Navigate to your steamapps folder on your hardrive and select one of the files in the list.

All games benefit from defragmenting the files starting with source 2007 while defragmenting the files named like the games benefit only those games. GFCScape will load the file and display information about its contents. Click on View > Columns to add the Fragmentation column to the menu.

Every value greater than 0,0 means that the file is fragmented and will benefit from defragmentation. To be able to defragment the files you need to enable Write Access which can be done in Options > Write Access.

I had to load a new file afterwards to be able to defragment it. To start the defragmentation of the files click on Tools > Defragment. This should only take a matter of seconds and display the fragmentation score of 0,0 after loading the game again.

This way you are able to fragment games like Counter Strike Source, Half-life 2 and Team Fortress 2 resulting in a speed up.

Read More:

GCFScape Download

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I got an 10% discount of the $49.95 retail price in October and was able to download Team Fortress 2 right away. This had another advantage: The rush on this game will be immense and it can very well be that the Steam servers will have bandwidth troubles in the first days of the release.

The other included games, Half-life Episode 2 and Portals have not been released as of now and have to be downloaded once the Orange Box comes out on October 10th.

I say that it is worth it. You pay less, get to play it early and can pwn all your friends once they get the game on October 10th.

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