The preloading of Half-Life 2 will start in less than 8 hours. In fact it's at 7:00 PST (PST=GMT-8) so we've got a little bit more to wait. Its purpose is to save some bandwith for the time when the game goes gold (one week or two) as it will download just textures and audio. Just install Steam if you haven't done it already and create an account. Over the Steampowered Forums people are getting more and more anxious to start preloading, but some try to stay positive (Postalgeist - "Maybe Valve is busy playing the secret Duke Nukem Forever beta?"). Well dude, if they had the secret Duke Nukem Forever beta, no firewall in the world could save them
http://www.gamershell.com/news/14875.html
http://www.gamershell.com/news/14875.html