With the new steam sale I have a lot of new games to play, but I can't actually play any of them because of bandwidth caps. I get 100gb a month and after that my connection slows down to a pretty unusable state. At work though we have very fast, free wifi. If I were able to download the files there on a laptop, is it possible to simply transfer those files onto my gaming pc and have steam recognize them when it goes to install my new game?

Steam menu -> backup and restore games

You could also just copy paste the folders out of SteamApps/Common and it will recognize them.

This is what I usually do. When you open Steam on the "new"/other computer, the games will either be in the list as "Update required" or something like that. Or they'll appear to be uninstalled (greyed out), but either way, once you try to "install" them, Steam will find the files there and just check to make sure they're good. Then you'll be good to go.

by the way, how much of a problem would it be to use cloud saves since you have a bandwidth cap?

I actually did that after I built my Pc back in January and transitioned from my old laptop to the new setup. I couldn't begin to tell you how though. I will warn that once you do it, all your games might not work. I know I had to re download Sleeping dogs, because it just wouldn't play.

@crithon: save files are tiny, like a few kilobytes.

@corruptedevil: in deed it is, but still not everything on steam has cloud save. Sometimes the save files can't even transfer over if your just clicking and files around.

bandwidth cap ? Does that even exist anymore ? Oh man that sucks :(