Half-Life 2 Pre-loading is now available.

[EricC]

Just log into steam and you should get a message about it :)

[JIMINATOR]

what is preloading?

[SALvation]

They are loading about 300MB of data through Steam so that when the game comes out, its that much less data people will have to download if they choose to buy off Steam. It's all data which supposedly won't change by the final release. So going gold must not be far off.