[OmegaZero_Alpha]

I want to start idling but I don't want to put hundreds and hundreds of hours of unnecesary work hours onto my hard drive (which has been causing a lot of premature failures in idlers that I have seen)

The solution I have found was to load TF2 into a ram disk. I have enough ram, I have already set up a ram disk, but is there a way to run TF2 from a different location than my steam folder so that I won't lose all of my settings when I have to dump this volatile memory?

[jwstohr]

I want to start idling but I don't want to put hundreds and hundreds of hours of unnecesary work hours onto my hard drive (which has been causing a lot of premature failures in idlers that I have seen)

The solution I have found was to load TF2 into a ram disk. I have enough ram, I have already set up a ram disk, but is there a way to run TF2 from a different location than my steam folder so that I won't lose all of my settings when I have to dump this volatile memory?

I used to run Wolfenstein: ET on a ramdisk a long time ago. Was amazing.

I have never used tf2 and VM together. But you could make a VM image of a tf2 install on xp/vista/win7 with all the settings you need. That way after dumping the ramdisk all you would have to do is drag the image back on it and run it. Again I don't idle, but if it just involves running tf2 minimized, that is how I would do it. Probably is a better way.

[Ranma]

Running off an image would be a good idea. Better than what i was going to suggest.

[Drunken F00l]

Close steam, move the cache file to your ram disk, add a symbolic link at the old cache location that points to the cache on your ram disk.

[Andrik]

using symlinks for sharing tf2 gcfs in local dc++ hub (for those ppl with slow connection)
also juction points are useful when setting up hlds or srcds server with lots of maps but when u need them in another place but u dont have enough space on hdd