Copying Steam games.

GTA V is on sale apparently, and Sabriena and I have been looking for games we can play together, so we were wondering if her PC would run it. Easiest way to determine that? Copy the files over from my laptop, sign in on my Steam, and see how it plays.

So I decided to try the age-old trick of starting the download, pausing it, closing steam, copying the files across via SMB, then restarting Steam. First issue: Sabriena’s laptop still won’t join the Homegroup. What is going on? Troubleshooter is thoroughly unhelpful, as usually.

Tried restarting the services, and one failed with an error message. Mercifully, it was at least something unique enough that we could Google it. Found an article on a Microsoft forum that says to adjust some permissions on a directory. Sounds weird, but okay. Tried it, and it worked, we’re back in luck and copying the files over.

No good, Steam doesn’t pick the changes up any more. Fuck. Pity it took over an hour of copying to work that out?

While it was copying, we figured out a few things. First of all Sabriena’s laptop doesn’t have 802.11ac, which meant pretty slow copying speeds. Luckily, you can pause and resume the copies, so I plugged her into the ethernet cable and resumed the transfers - it turns out she’s only got fast ethernet as well. In a laptop made in 2015!

Went and checked with iperf3 after it was done copying, and for some reason we can get close to wire speed on the fast ethernet connection, but 802.11n is only good for 40mbps, with her laptop about 10 feet from the router and nothing else using it.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, tried to use a USB hard drive and Steam’s “backup” feature, which promptly froze my laptop to the point of unresponsiveness. I reboot, and take a quick look with task manager, and I’m pretty sure Windows Defender is the culprit. Why is it running? I have anti-virus software, I don’t need two. Could this be to blame for the sluggish performance I’ve had from time to time?

I turn this thing off, but it has the nasty habit of turning itself back on. Found a potential registry key on superuser.com to disable it permanently:

reg add  "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Real-Time Protection" /v DisableRealtimeMonitoring /t REG_DWORD /d 1

We’ll see if that will stay put or if Windows Update blows it away again. Really unimpressed with Windows these days.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

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Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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