If you are tired of the way Half Life 2 automatically saves your game every time you turn a corner or meet (or defeat) a new character, you can use two tweaks to disable autosaving in the game. Firstly, refer to the sv_autosave command in the Advanced Tweaking section, as using this will disable the autosaving which occurs at the start of new levels. You'll have to insert sv_autosave 0 in the autoexec.cfg file to disable it.
Secondly, go to your \Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\[username]\half-life 2\hl2\ directory, and find the following files:
autosave01.sav
autosave01.tga
autosave.sav
autosave.tga
Right-click on each file, select Properties and tick the 'Read Only' box to make each unable to be written to. This prevents Half Life 2 from actually performing a save onto these autosave files, and in the process you reduce all the saving pauses within levels as you pass certain autosave points.
If you wish you can choose to disable one form of autosaving and not the other, and if you do disable both then make very sure that you manually save often, either by using the Save option, your Quicksave key, or the save console command.
