Is it straightforward to reinstall steam/half life 2 on a reinstalled xp machine?

Factual Questions
1

Long story short: I ended up with a fresh installation of XP on my machine because attempts to update the gfx drivers on the other one borked it.

Now I want to play half life again. What with the system they use for copy protection will it just be a case of reinstalling it and clicking ‘I already have a steam account’? Or will I have to arse-about?

2

Shouldn’t be any problem. Shouldn’t. YMMV of course, because in reading all the message boards for Steam and Valve, who knows what kinds of evil problems will arise for whatever reason.

At any rate, I installed HL2 on my laptop, logged onto to Steam, and the game wouldn’t stop crashing. Then I installed in on my desktop, and logged on Steam, and just went the “Already have account” route without any problem.

Then I upgraded my sys with a new mobo/processor, and re-installed HL2 on desktop on a different H/D. At this point, I had to re-register Windows XP, but wasn’t allowed to via online, because I had already dome that with a H/D upgrade. So I had to call Microsoft to re-activate Windows. Then I logged on to Steam - again, no problem, just logged on to existing account.

Good luck!

3

Sounds promising. Thanks :slight_smile:

4

Of course, after I did all that, Steam proceeded to erase everything on my hard drive, and it also deleted anything on disks within 20 feet of my computer. It demagnetized the stripes on ALL of my credit cards. It reprogramed my ATM access code, screwed up the tracking on my VCR and used subspace field harmonics to scratch any CD’s I attempted to play. It re-calibrated my refrigerator’s coolness settings so all my ice cream melted and my milk curdled. It programmed my phone autodial to call only my mother-in-law’s number. Steam also mixed antifreeze into my fish tank. It drank all my beer. It left dirty socks on the coffee table when I was expecting company. Its radioactive emissions caused my toe jam and bellybutton fuzz to migrate behind my ears. It replaced my shampoo with Nair while dating my wife behind my back and billed their hotel rendezvous to my Visa card. It caused me to run with scissors and throw things in a way that is only fun until someone loses an eye. It gave me Dutch Elm Disease and Tinea. It rewrote my backup files, changing all my active verbs to passive tense and incorporating undetectable misspellings which grossly changed the interpretations of key sentences.

If Steam is opened in a WindowsXP environment, it will leave the toilet seat up and leave your hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will not only remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, but it will also refill your skim milk with whole milk. It will replace all your luncheon meat with Spam. It will molecularly rearrange your cologne or perfume, causing it to smell like dill pickles. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve. These are just a few side effects of re-installing Steam.

YMMV

[sub]no, I did not think that up. It’s an old virus joke.[/sub]

5

[sub]so… what you are basically saying is… probably not a good idea to re-install it?.. [/sub]

(Actually steam is indirectly responsible for the borkification of my original xp installation. It bugged me that my gfx drivers were not the latest, so I proceeded to install the latest ones, at which point things went rather south.)

6

Heh. That figures. To be honest, I’ve been enjoying about a week of problem free gaming once I got my hardware upgrades. Only once did I get the dreaded “Half Life 2 is currently unavailable” notice. (Well why the hell not!?! I payed for it!!!) It only lasted a minute or so.

Get fraggin!!!

7
      • You are supposed to be able to re-download the entire thing if you bought it by download–you just go and download the free Steam installer, enter your Steam account name and password, and after that it should get the whole thing for you again.
  • If you installed from a retail CD/DVD package, you just re-install it again on a fresh OS. It will ask for your Steam username and password, and that’s all you need to do, it may ask you for the serial number but you can cancel that, because re-entering your username and password and saving them on the PC “includes” that data, so to speak. If you try to re-register with the same serial number, it will just tell you that you can’t, and cancel out. Also–it’s wise to delete the program off the old machine, and delete any registry keys pertaining to “steam” and the steam program, as Valve disables shares serial numbers. If both machines should ever try to sign on at once, you are instantly out whatever you paid for it.
  • If you want to reinstall HL-2/Steam, you have to first uninstall the whole thing using the uninstall program, and then go through your registry and remove any keys that have the reference “steam” in them and that pertain to the Steam program. If you do not do this, any faulty settings that Steam had before, it will have again when you reinstall, because that info is stored in the registry somewhere and not normally uninstalled. …And after I did this, I found that the normal CD installer would to longer run, the CD just told me that “Steam must be installed first before installing Half-Life 2”, so there was at least one registry key that my search missed, but all I searched for was “steam”. I downloaded the Steam installer off the Valve website and ran that, and afterwards, the retail-CD installed HL-2 again.
  • Coincidentally, I have a GeForce 5600 FX and every now and then Steam tells me that there’s updated drivers available and warns me that I should be using the latest drivers… but when I tried to use the updated drivers, they worked fine for everything except HL-2. When I would start HL-2, it would run for a few seconds, and then cause the PC to reboot. Every time.
  • The reason I had to re-install HL-2 was that I accidentally clicked on the “dedicated server”, not knowing what it was, and that installed, and then HL-2 would no longer run, it said “dedicated server not available”. I could find no “uninstall dedicated server” option, or “do not use dedicated server”, fucking assholes. The Valve support forum was no help, the question of how to undo this kind of shit went unanswered, the only way Valve officially says to reinstall is by using the normal methods, which does not remove bad Steam registry settings at all. So over an afternoon, after only a few attempts, I managed to get HL-2 reinstalled and working properly. But now when I try to play HL-1 at all, guess what it says? “Dedicated Server not available”. So now my HL-1 does not work at all; I have not bothered to try reinstalling that yet.
  • Also–regarding modding, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get a customized map to list and play as a normal game–the only way to start it is to start a regular HL-2 game, and then use the dev console to switch to the custom map. This is colossally retarded, considering that they made the mod tools available right away. There is no game option to “play custom game” in the regular menu, like in HL-1.
  • My retail-Cd game now will play without the CD#1 inserted, but it still takes like five minutes to start up if I want to play in offline mode. And if I have an internet connection live, it starts up in about ten seconds. Steam sits there for five minutes with its digital thumb up it’s ass, BEFORE bringing up a panel that says “no connection is available, do you want to play in offline mode?”.
  • I won’t buy any game or other software that uses Steam, or anything like it, ever again. For many people it is basically internet-dependent, and the requirements did not state that. If there’s a class-action suit filed for consumer fraud, I want on. I can perfectly understand the makers not wanting people to use shared and hacked serials on their servers, but it seems like they could have done that without causing nearly as much trouble (and without fucking up a HL-1 install!). Vivendi/Valve seems to have gotten the bright idea of making hackers try to hit a moving target, but the problem is, if you have a legitimate problem, you are left hitting a moving target as well. Steam does not tell you everything it does or when, and Valve has no interest in helping you undo anything that Steam does. Fuck that.
    ~