Steam Deck: Thread 01

[speedlolita]

And Fortnite.

[nonny]

Wo Long Fallen Dynasty just got verified...

Also been hearing the latest firmware for the ROG Ally fixes a lot of the low TDP performance and now it's seeing a 15% improvement across the board... so maybe the battery will fare better at launch.

[Neon Ignition]

Well, 1TB upgrade done and that was... horrible


I unscrewed the casing etc fine but the connector to the battery did not want to budge at all. Took quite a long time as nudging the cable and its covering was very close to risking damage thanks to the stubborness of how hard it was staying in there. I ended up eventually working it less than a millimetre out and then carefully working into the gap on the port the corner tip of a set of tweezers and pushing it out. I 100% wouldn't want to have to do it again. The rest was straight forward enough in swapping the SDD and putting it back together.

But then came the OS flash. Valve, frankly, hasn't put enough testing into the downloadable flash file. It took around two hours to get the Deck working again because the OS killed the face buttons and the system would connect to Wi-Fi but fail to download the necessary software update. Error after error after error and eventually it stated it was starting to download the update. That stayed on for an age, turns out that's a bug as well and I had to shutdown and restart the Deck blind, hoping I wasn't doing so at a point it might brick the system. It restarted and said that it had an update to install but that then failed. Googling later finally led to a forum discussion where a poster suggested that the update for the OS wouldn't install whilst the Deck was connected to the Dock you need for the prior stages, took that out and eventually it finished and works fine now.

So, the Deck has 1TB available now leaving the process of setting up and installing dual boot Windows left but that first upgrade stage hasn't half tempered my enthusiasm for more dabbling with the hardware

[nonny]

Ouch sorry to hear that. Mine was fairly painless but I did find the flash file for Steam OS worked better off the SD card than a USB drive.

I tried a few USB sticks and it didnt boot but it worked perfectly (and fast) off the SD card.

Hopefully your Windows install is easier...

[Neon Ignition]

Praying so, once that's done I don't think I'll ever mess with it again

[Neon Ignition]

I'm still circling the Windows Dual Boot process and am still wary of doing anything involving messing with SteamOS again.

I have a 200GB SD Card so I'm pondering whether I should instead leave the existing SteamOS 1TB drive alone and install Windows to the SD card, doing it that way. I'd be limited to 100GB+ of space for Windows but with 1TB of Steam storage that seems like a minor quibble.

[nonny]

If you wanted barebones windows you could look at that Tiny11 project but I fear that might cause more issues than it's worth...

I hear windows performance off the SD card isn't great but it's worth trying it out as there's no real downside to testing it.

[Neon Ignition]

I think I'm done now, Windows is installed and set up and with a last minute change of plan with the SD card I now have in effect a 1.5TB Deck.

Should the Windows installation ever fail due to running on an SD card I'll be okay as it's all isolated to the card so the Deck and its main drive etc are all seperate and there's nothing else but gaming running via Windows. I have around 5 games installed on the Windows SD and around 14 on Steam OS so as things stand around 1TB worth of space still free between the two

[fishbowlhead]

SteamDeck hardware sale.

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck/

[nonny]

I know the 512gb one is 20% off but you're still better off grabbing the basic 64gb one and an SSD separately and upgrading.

Well worth it at that price.

[Dogg Thang]

Those are some good savings. Since getting mine, it has been my most played machine. Although that’s somewhat by default because I don’t own a modern PS or XBox and my youngest kid has stolen my Switch.

[nonny]

I've tapered off using mine so often but that's mainly due to taking the Switch to work now playing Zelda TotK.

Once I'm done I'll switch back.

I know the ROG Ally is out now but this is still a great system.

[MartyG]

I know the 512gb one is 20% off but you're still better off grabbing the basic 64gb one and an SSD separately and upgrading.

Well worth it at that price.

That'll be why they're now out of stock then

[nonny]

Damn they're all out of stock... didn't think they'd sell out that fast.

[Neon Ignition]

They seem to be really struggling with manufacturing these this year