[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.