Schedule Steam (and use your Offpeak bandwidth)

Antipodeans get a raw deal when it comes to the Internet. It's expensive and slow, not to mention it's become a political hot potatoe with several poorly thought out schemes relating to the internet being pushed through in Canberra.

Politics aside for now, that's not the reason for this post.

With the core market for Valve's Steam service no doubt being the American market little attention was paid to download manager style features such as bandwidth throttling and scheduling. Valve's bandwidth heavy Cornocopia of Software can chew through the average Australian/NZ household's monthly bandwidth allocation in hours.

Most Australian bandwidth plans have a Peak and Offpeak timesplit. Peak obviously falls into all those times you're likely to use the Internet. Unless you're a serious nightowl, at month's end you've probably still got a considerable amount of your Offpeak bandwidth allocation remaining.

Steam doesn't offer built in download scheduling so here is a short recipe on how you can coax Stream to schedule a download for the Offpeak internet hours.

I'm using Windows XP in this example, I can only assume it's similar for Vista and Windows 7.

Firstly on the Login screen of Steam make sure you have the "remember password" option checked. You'll need to do this to allow Steam to automatically login and resume or initiate a download.

Login in to steam initially, and go to the "My Games" tab and right click to "Install game..." on an undownloaded title you'd like to download and install. Steam will present you with details about the install, click next proceed. It will the process the file cache, and then ask you if you wish to create a shortcut to the desktop, which you should check (this is needed for later). The download will begin.

Now that you've compleated the manual steps to setup the download, you can exit Stream. Once it's shutdown we can schedule the download for Offpeak hours.

Go to your Desktop and find the shortcut you chose to create from Steam in the previous step. Right click on the shortcut and choose properties. You'll be presented with the shortcut properties. On this screen there will be a textbox labelled "Target". Highlight all the text in this textbox and copy it to your pasteboard. In this example the text I copied is (It's Half Life 2: Deathmatch):

"c:\Program Files\Steam\steam.exe\" -applaunch 240

Next choose Start->Run from the Main OS Menu, and type "cmd" in into the textbox presented in order to open a command window.

We'll be using the command line command "schtasks" to schedule the Steam download.

In the example below I've scheduled Steam to begin downloading at 2:00 AM in the morning. This is a typical Offpeak time, but you're might be different so you might want to check.

Now we can construct the command line:

schtasks /Create /TR "\"C:\Program Files\Steam\steam.exe\" -applaunch 240" /ST 02:00:00 /SC ONCE /TN Steam

I've used the text I copied from the desktop shortcut as you can see. Pay special notice to the "\" characters I've inserted before the quotes. These are required to be able to input the whole command properly.

The schtasks application should ask you for your user password to properly schedule Steam. If your user account doesn't have a password, you should probably set one. Typically schtasks won't run properly if you don't have a user password on your user account.

You can see the scheduled task(s) by just running "schtasks". It's generally worth trying it first by running it in a minute or two's time to test it's all working properly. Just logout of Steam and reschedule to the appropriate time after you're satisfied.