I’m increasingly running into a problem when heading out to coffee shops, or on the road traveling. When I get to the cafe or hotel, I often find that games (particularly new-ish games) almost always need to seem to update. On my home internet, that’s hardly a problem at all (400Mbps connection.)
But since I have a gaming desktop, as well as a gaming laptop, when I’m at home it’s pretty infrequent that I fire up the notebook at all. On the road this can be a real problem since public wifi is often oversaturated, or just not that fast in the first place. And when I get to my destination I find that I need 40GB worth of updates. Steam being Steam, will refuse to launch the game at all if there are updates available and insist on downloading the whole friggin’ game before I can play.
I can kind of sidestep this issue if I remember to disconnnect from wifi before firing up Steam, but unfortunately I’m not usually that bright Since most of the games I play are single player, it usually makes more sense to just play the older version…if I can remember to check first.
I can sympathize with being bandwidth-stuck like that - I’ve lived a hotspot life far too much, which is not very conducive to modern multiplayer games. Honestly, this sounds like a case of prep work. I don’t know how much notice you get, but it sounds like the gaming laptop is effectively mothballed until you’re actively on the road. The way I see it, you have two options:
A. Have a “Charge the laptop” mental routine when you’re packing or whatever, on and logged in so it can do al the updating and syncing.
II. Have the laptop in permanent “Offline Mode” for Steam.
Another option is to have a sticky note either on the laptop to charge and update the pc before leaving or the sticky note on the keyboard reminding you to disconnect from wifi before playing steam!
I was stuck in this conundrum a while back, and decided that I don’t need to pursue the latest and greatest graphics - and with that I should have some flexibility to be on the go. I drive a laptop as my everything machine (Dell XPS 15 9530 13th gen) and have an eGPU dock to “desktop-ize” the laptop, with two SSDs and one extra drive in the eGPU dock itself:
Laptop SSD 1: OS and Programs
Laptop SSD 2: Documents and Games that I want on the go
eGPU SSD: Games that I know that I won’t want on the go
Honestly, it was quite liberating to realize how much I could get out of a laptop, if I wasn’t chasing the latest and greatest all the time. It’s been 6 years since I’ve had this approach and just switched laptops once (just recently this year) and I get to play everything I want/need.
PS: I only care about hitting 60 fps and a stable framerate, I have given up on becoming a competitive gamer
With Steam games in particular, I have the option to share updates on the local network enabled so my Steamdeck can fetch updates quickly from my main PC before I leave for weekends.
All of these are good suggestions, though maybe not practical if time or memory don’t allow. I have a memory like a sieve, though once I finally do pick up a habit I’ve got it for life. So creating a ‘ritual’ before leaving my domicile would eventually establish it in my brain, though it might take a year or three. And sometimes by whim or necessity I just hit the road instead of making preparations.
The external drive for a steam library is a great idea, except for the fact that I tend to forget small things - like external NVME drives LOL. But I can eventually teach myself new habits, so that may be a good approach.
@teltersat I’ve pondered the eGPU approach, but from what I’m read the limited PCIe/Thunderbolt bandwidth often (but not always) leaves a lot of performance on the table. And I once tried the “one-laptop-to-rule-them-all” with an i9 MacBook Pro…which promptly tried to melt itself. It does have some shortcomings, the big one being no backup computer if the laptop craters.
And I ran into an additional complication today at the coffee shop: 5 minutes after powering it up, it shutdown with a dead battery despite being fully charged the night before. I finally found a spot at the cafe with a power outlet, and the laptop charged to full power in 15 minutes. Not a good sign at all. How did it go from ~1 hour of battery life one day, to 5 minutes the next day? Anyway, now to ponder laying out $100 or so for a new battery, or putting that money towards a new gaming laptop. Not a trivial spend, and the old clunker can still run stuff like Cyberpunk and Starfield at Medium/HIgh…
What about using the SteamDB Discord bot in your own server to get notifications about updates your games are getting?
You’re still gonna need to setup reminders and act on them but at least doesn’t involve reminding yourself to bring along an external drive or turn on your PC for no reason.
To charge it you could get a smart socket, keep the laptop on the charger with the socket off and schedule it to turn on the night before you leave.
The stupidest thing I can think of is using a SwitchBot Bot, which is an IoT mechanical switch, that turns on your laptop regularly and let Steam update games that way automatically. Then you can check if the games were updated on it through the Steam smartphone app and turn it off through an RDP session or the power button.
I agree - there are two points that you’d need to think about:
Temps! You actually have to be smart about “thermal management”, if you’re going this route. I have a 13700H with a low wattage RTX 4070 in my XPS 9530. It’s not thermally crazy, and it works wonders.
Bandwidth! I agree, performance is lost on the table, but this is a tradeoff I was willing to make. Like I said, I don’t pursue 300+ framerate (even though I do get it for the most part). I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you let go a little bit of the ULTRA graphics, you can be more flexible with your setup.
PS: I still have to make a run at Cyberpunk 2077 to see the ultimate impact. I will try that in a couple of hours.
Bulk of updates I’d see [steam wise], are usually in Kb to low MB
…Certainly annoying, but must be addressing something, novel of sorts
Any bigg [scheduled] updates, I would just nip in butt, while on the home network
Since most of the games I play are single player, it usually makes more sense to just play the older version…if I can remember to check first.