Deleting Game Files to Increase Game Performance

[Hawkens85]

For the past couple of months, I've noticed my load times for TF2 getting slower and slower. Specs:

Vista
Q6600
3GB RAM
GTS 250

I'm trying out a few solutions I'm finding online (creating a scan exception to that ever-changing TF2 file, etc.) but saw something mentioned about deleting everything in your Steam/steamapps/username/team fortress 2 folder. Supposedly it clears out a bunch of crap (customized sounds, maps, of which I have little to none). Question: since I don't have all that other stuff clogging my game, would it really help to delete that folder and start fresh? Clarification - I don't have a problem with FPS, my vid card and RAM are doing fairly well, it's just my load times. I've not tried reformatting the HDD, although I defrag very often.

TL;DR - Speeding up TF2 load times by deleting TF2 folder?

[Dwragon]

deleting everything in your Steam/steamapps/username/team fortress 2 folder.

Its fine as long as you use the steam cloud, backup/no autoexec file and you don't have any custom maps/sounds/mods. What the game does is cache sprays and avatars. If you play a lot, this can build-up overtime but the worse I can see it do it add more fragmentation.

So you can do that, defrag your cache files in steam and do a HD defrag. Going a bit further, hopefully you have at least a 7200 rpm hard drive but if you want bump up to a 10k or even an SSD. Lastly you can overclock/get a higher clocked cpu. HTH.

[Hawkens85]

I'm just trying to make sure, since the /team fortress 2 folder seems like it has a ton of stuff in it that's essential to the game. Also, does anyone know what the steam/steam apps/username/team fortress 2/tf/downloads folder is?

[Drunken F00l]

The /team fortress 2 contains some game files extracted from the GCF (safe to delete -- anything needed will just get reextracted) and also your configs and anything custom you've ever downloaded (maps, sounds, etc.). If you want to keep these then don't delete your team fortress 2 folder.

The downloads folder contains other players' sprays. Safe to delete.