Skins, hats and pets are purchasable using real money. Game data • Link. Configuration file(s) location. Need to share data from a host PC to a virtual machine OS? Learn how to share data using copy and paste, USB, and shared folders. Type %WinDir%\System32\Drivers\Etc into the Run window and click OK. Rename the Hosts file to “Hosts. old”. Copy or move the Hosts file that you created from.
 
 

 

Pc games from data file host. How to reset the Hosts file back to the default

 

Nearly every major publisher these days has its own digital storefront. Most of them also offer a certain minimum set of features, or at least have plans to release such features. Cloud saves and game syncing are obviously critical components, but as someone with far too many PCs—they’re for testing, honestly!

That might seem like a relatively minor detail, but with game install sizes often passing the GB mark, my 1TB per month data cap from Comcast Xfinity can be a problem, especially with up to eight different test PCs. Let me quickly run through the major stores and mention how they work right now, before I get to the worst offender at least in my book. Not every store is ‘perfect,’ but most at least offer a workaround.

Guess which company comes up short. You’ll need to grab two things. You can find the number for the game in question by searching for the game on Steam and looking at the URL. So as an example, Hunt: Showdown is game number The other thing you need is the game files, which are in the Common subfolder. Usually this is pretty easy to figure out—again, Hunt: Showdown’s folder is simply called “Hunt Showdown”. Copy both the ACF file and the game folder to the appropriate Steam folder on a different PC and when you next start Steam, you’ll find the new game listed.

You can use the same process to back up a game’s files, rather than trying to use Steam’s built-in backup functionality. That’s mostly because there’s no separate ACF file to worry about. I do this over a Gigabit Ethernet connection, which is still pretty slow if you’re looking at moving GB of data typically about 15 minutes.

Technically the folder can be placed anywhere on the new PC—or even a network drive, though if you’re not using 10GbE I wouldn’t do that. Start up GOG Galaxy, go to your library, and click on the appropriate game. Once finished, start Uplay on the other PC, click on the appropriate game icon in your library, and below the big blue “Download” button you should see a link that says “Locate installed game. Find the game folder it can be anywhere, though the default is the same as the Battle.

Next to the big, blue Install button is a text link that says “Already installed? Locate the game. Whether you’ve used the default location or changed it to some other folder, that folder on the new PC is where you need to copy the game folder. Once the file transfer is complete, however, you still need to click the orange “Download” button—if everything was done properly, rather than downloading the files, Origin will verify the files and install the game.

It’s a bit less obvious but overall relatively painless. Bethesda Launcher: The process is nearly identical to that of Origin. Start the Bethesda Launcher client, click on the game, and then click on the “Download” button. If the files are present, the launcher will verify them and sync your cloud saves. The above are all very easy compared to the final two options. First let’s hit everyone’s favorite….

Epic Games Launcher: This one will involve more work, but if you’re familiar enough with PCs and Windows Explorer, it’s possible to skip a full second or third… download of any game on EGS. First, get the Epic Games Launcher installed on the new PC, log in, and get the confirmation email code for your account which can sometimes take several minutes to arrive.

Go to your library, find the game you want to transfer from the other PC, and click the Install button. Yes, do this first. That’s step one.

Basically, find the game folder on the new PC where EGS started to download the files, and look for an “. Finally, once the file copy is finished, restart the Epic Games Launcher, go to the Library, and click resume on the game.

It can take several minutes on a slower drive to validate the files, but eventually the game should be available to play. Whether your cloud saves will come along for the ride is another story. Yes, this is a pain in the butt compared to Uplay or GOG, but at least it’s possible.

Which brings up the caboose. Microsoft Store: And finally, the black sheep of digital software platforms known as the Microsoft Store or formerly, Windows Store. Do you want to transfer an existing game download from one PC to another, without downloading the game again? Too bad!

You can’t do it. Or at least, I couldn’t get it to work after much effort. The files themselves are initially owned by the TrustedInstaller user, and you probably don’t want to take ownership as it can screw things up.

But even if you do take ownership and give your account full access rights—on both the source and destination PCs—and then copy the files over, there’s a problem. The Microsoft Store won’t recognize the files and it won’t have the appropriate license.

If you’ve already downloaded a game in the Windows Store, you’re pretty much out of luck. Your only option is to download the entire game, again, on another PC. That might not be such a horrible thing if you’re dealing with Candy Crush Saga, but the bigger games like Forza, Sea of Thieves, and Gears can easily register at more than 50GB.

There is a sort of workaround if you haven’t yet downloaded the game and you know you want to have it on multiple PCs. This old Forza Horizon 3 Reddit thread has the details, which I’ll summarize here. First, you need an application to monitor network traffic, and the free utility Fiddler is recommended. I did this for Gears of War 5 and got a link that was at assets1. Anyway, grab that URL and then you’ll probably want to paste it into a file downloading utility.

Many games are quite large—Gears of War 5 checks in at 66GB—so this can take a while. Once the download was finished, I ended up with a single massive file, named “Microsoft. The final step is to install the application via PowerShell. You should see a progress bar across the top of the PowerShell screen indicating installation progress. Obviously, a slower drive will take much longer to complete the installation.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past year, mostly thanks to Epic, about the minimum feature set a digital storefront should provide. Localization, ratings, news, forums, and plenty of other items are important as well. Why is backing up or transferring files in my list? Because imagine you have an existing gaming PC that’s a bit long in the tooth. It happens every few years for most of us.

So you go out and buy a new motherboard, CPU, memory, storage, graphics card, case, and power supply. You’re ready to rock. Now all you need to do is copy over your games—because unless you have an unlimited data cap and a massive internet pipe I’m thinking gigabit fiber , it would suck to have to download everything again.

Been there, done that. It’s mostly possible, but Microsoft ends up as the odd man out. How is it that Microsoft, a trillion dollar company, can have such a bad digital platform? The Epic Games Store has gotten a lot of flak deservedly so in many cases , but at least it’s improving over time. The Microsoft Store meanwhile has been pretty awful from day one, and years later it’s still extremely user unfriendly.

Ideally, Microsoft and Epic, along with any other digital storefronts should add a way to import game files from an existing location. Uplay and GOG did that several years back. At the very minimum, a way to back up and restore applications would suffice. Jarred’s love of computers dates back to the dark ages when his dad brought home a DOS 2. He eventually built his first custom PC in with a 12MHz, only to discover it was already woefully outdated when Wing Commander was released a few months later.

From the first S3 Virge ‘3D decelerators’ to today’s GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance. Jarred Walton opens in new tab. More features.

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