Steam – My internet is so slow Steam gives up downloading the stuff. What can I do

steam

Well, I'm in a difficult situation at the moment. I'm temporarily apart from my usual internet connection, and forced to use a really shitty solution. It's slow in ways I can't even explain: sometimes Chrome gives up at loading simple pages due to timeout errors.
Going straight to the point: I've bought some titles in the current sale, and want to play some of them the sooner possible. The problem is I can't download any of them. In fact this happens with every program that implements its own downloading system – they just go corrupt or cancel in the midlle of the process.

Software specialized in downloading stuff usually do just fine for me, but Steam just won't. Is there any workaround? Perhaps some different configuration or external tool. I can login (after some insistence) just ok, but not download any game/update.

Best Answer

If you have access to another computer at a location with a properly working network, then you can:

  • Log onto that computer
  • install steam
  • Download the game you want (to that other computer), using the steam client.
  • Then download the relevant files from the other location to yours using a protocol which works even in very poor connections (e.g. sFTP with resume, scp, http (move the downloaded file to a webserver), ... )

This will work if the download speed is a problem in combination with the steam client.

It will not work (or work poorly) if the problem is not the download speed, but some other reason which messes up your network (e.g. lost packets). Which is likely given that other programs such as Chrome also run into problems. In that case the proper solution would be to fix your network, which starts with identifying what goes wrong.

You did not add any OS to your question, but start with this:

  • SteamOS/Linux: ifconfig
    eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 01:27:B0:14:DA:FE
    UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
    RX packets:2746252626 errors:0 dropped:1151734 overruns:0 frame:0
    TX packets:4109502155 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
    collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
    RX bytes:427998700000 (408171.3 Mb) TX bytes:3530782240047 (3367216.3 Mb)
    Interrupt:40 Memory:d8000000-d8012700
  • OS X: ifconfig (probably with EN0 rather than ETH0)
  • Windows 7: [start] [run] cmd netstat -s
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