Okay, I know that this has to be the most unrelated question on the forums, but I just bought Half-life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Lost Coast, and deathmatch. I downloaded Half-life 2, EP 1, deathmatch, and all I need left is HL2 Episode 2 ( I won’t download Lost Coast). It was 61% done, and this was a few hours after I got a Windoze message saying that I had very low “Virtual memory”. So, while Episode 2 was downloading, I was going to play Episode 1. I tried the first part of the game, and my machine completely rebooted without even telling Windoze…what went wrong? I kinda need someone more tech savvy than I, and thanks in advance.
yeah the help section is for not related to Black mesa help, if bm isnt out why would you want help with it?
and it sound like you need a new PC man.
Yeah, I pretty much have a suckish PC…
1.15 Ghz Processor
AMD Anthlon XP 32-bit
1 GB RAM
256 MB NVIDIA 6200 AGP 8x
300W Power Supply Unit
Creative Sound Blaster
40 GB HDD
(Linux Keyboard 
)
Same here! 
Let’s seee…you should try increasing your virtual memory
Go to
Control Panel: System, Advanced, Performance, Settings, Advanced, Virtual Memory
And increase it to around, 1,5gb, well, only if you have enough HDD space, otherwise, atleast increase it to 1gb
https://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/intro.aspx
Check there for the Orange Box. But, I’m still pretty sure your computer needs to be upgraded.
Good Luck.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot to mention you need to install an ActiveX or Java plugin to view the results, It’ll do it automatically.
This message means that Windows doesn’t find enough memory to run all the applications you have opened. There’s basically two types of memory that come into play here. Physical memory and virtual memory. Physical memory consists of one or several sticks of RAM memory plugged into your computer’s mainboard (1 GB as you stated). As a sort of “reserve”, there’s virtual memory.
Windows automatically designates a piece of your harddisk as “virtual memory”. If the physical memory gets full, Windows will start using the harddisk as a sort of virtual “reserve” memory, so it can still support all programs you have running. The downside is that virtual memory is enormously slow compared to physical memory, so this will greatly cut into the speed of your computer.
There are basically two easy solutions. One: add more RAM to your computer. If you know your mainboard type, or look up your mainboard type using CPU-Z, you should be able to determine either by looking in the case or by Google’ing, how much slots for physical memory RAM sticks there are in there. If you then look inside the case (or use CPU-Z again) to find out how many RAM sticks are in there, you can find out if there are any free slots. If there are, you could add some more physical RAM to your computer (as long as you make sure it fits with your mainboard and current ram).
The other solution is to close some programs. The Orange Box system requirements says you require 512 MB RAM to play it. Since you have 1024 MB RAM, this should work without you running out of physical memory, let alone virtual memory. You could press CTRL+ALT+DEL to start the Windows Task Manager and find out which open programs are eating away your memory and see if you really need them active while you’re playing games.
Remember every program you have open (including the programs in your system tray, right-bottom, next to the clock) uses up system memory. The more you close, the more memory you have for other programs. Especially programs like MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, e-mail applications, virus scanners et cetera tend to eat up a lot of memory quickly.
In addition, you could also try to increase the amount of virtual memory Windows XP can use, but remember virtual memory is very slow, especially for playing games. See this article for information on adjusting the virtual memory.
Hope this helps you along a bit more. 
We are SO alike! I tried increasing the virtual memory earlier this morning …are you my stalker?
I seem to have fixed the problem by forcing DirectX 8. It works fine now, and I thank-you all for the tips for making my Windoze operate faster!
I played Half-Life 2 on:
AMD Athlon 1GHz
512Mb RAM
Raedon 9200
20GB HDD
So its surprising what it will run on, my advice is don’t try the orange box until you upgrade though
Glad to be of service; and I hope things keep working for you in the future!