My motherboard went and died on me so I had to replace it. Unfortunately due to the nature of computers, this meant a full re-install of the operating system. When it was all finished I was presented with a silky smooth clean install of Vista. Now came to loading my favourite apps back on.
On went firefox and Office and all the other gubbins, but when it came to Steam, I realised that I had 60GB of games, there's no way I'm downloading all that again!You would have thought this was an easy thing, to just copy the games over and all would be fine and well. Not so. If you login before you've done the tranfer, steam hates you and will present you with a load of problems like games installed but not working, half the downloads permanently on 99% etc.
Some forums recommend using Steam's built-in "backup" feature. Even if I had had the chance to use this, I'd have about 12 DVDs worth of Steam software lying around. Not ideal.
Actually the answer is simple: Install steam, but BEFORE you login close it down and transfer the steamapps folder from your old installation to your new one. Voila, it's like they never left.
