It's unbelievable how many posts there are about HL2 freezing on people. That being said, I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

I installed HL2 when it first came out and really never touched it again. I recenty reinstalled it after doing a clean install of XP and upgrading parts of the system from when I previously installed HL2. The 2 major upgrades have been a Ram upgrade (512MB PC 2700 to 1GB PC 3200) **Please see my previous posts about the detailed settings it took to get the system stable **
and the other upgrade was the Video card (5700 to 6600).

The problem I have been having now is freezing. I haven't "stopwatched" it, but I can play for a while (less than an hour, probably closer to 30 minutes), and the system will freeze completely. No sound loop, as I've heard described, just freeze. Alt-tabbing doesn't work. Ctrl-alt-del doesn't work either. The only thing that does work is a hard reset.

I thought of upgrading the PS since I'm pretty much maxing out the motherboard (A7N8X-E Deluxe Rev 2.xx) with an AMD XP 3200, the aformentioned ram, the vid card, a tv tuner, a dvd burner, a dvd player, and two hard drives. The PS I have is the Antec 380W that came with the Sonata Tower (the original, the the recently release "2")

The only other thing I can think of is HL2 may be very memory dependent and doesn't like the dual channel setup, or the onboard sound is causing an issue.

Any ideas?

get latests drivers first video sound etc