Its Steam thats the problem!

[dom_xbox]

I havent played CS:S in a while.. but had the 8+gb worth of steam with hl2 which id bought ij the collectors pack..

formatted pc, rared the backup and then unpacked after install... now steam it said it needed 3gb of space to install CS:S.. umm its already there??

could it be it just needs the registry files for cs source.. ok.. so i install hl2 with cs:s..

try again it need 2+gb free space so blast the backup over the installed folder..

now it says i need 800mb of free space.. wtf!

just left it updating.. its only at 25%.. im sure i got the latest update for cs:s too..

if i choose the backup game option will it act like the cached files?

[scottyman]

backup is the option you want - it seems to work fine, plus I burnt mine on to DVD - made it much faster to install on my laptop. i think you still lose all of the custom maps and bindings tho.

[directhex]

the steam backup creates a mildly compressed series of data files, containing the required GCFs. you need a fair bit of space to extract the contents, before moving to the right place. if you're that syuck for space & time, just back up the GCFs themselves to a CD, reinstall steam on a freshly formatted box, and move them back to where they were

[axis09]

i uninstalled steam a few months back and it buggered a few of my other programs completely,
now i cnat install anything valve as i get errors all the time
and i cant be arsed formatting just to play CS.S again

[ajbrun]

i uninstalled steam a few months back and it buggered a few of my other programs completely,
now i cnat install anything valve as i get errors all the time
and i cant be arsed formatting just to play CS.S again

It really isn't that bad IMO. What errors do you get exactly?