Orange Boxes, Portals, and Mods by Some Guy Named Gary

[bicostp]

I'm thinking of picking up The Orange Box (mainly for Portal and Garry's Mod ). I have a few questions:

1. My machine has a 128 MB Radeon 9200. Should it run the games in at least 1024x768 at a decent frame rate? (Preferably 1280x1024, the monitor's native res.)

2. I downloaded the HL2 demo from Download.com and Gamershell.com, and both copies install a handful of files for HL2 (that equal about 3 gigs for some reason), but Steam doesn't load up. It's running in the Task Manager, but there's no trace of it on the screen. It probably has to do with #3.

3. Apparently it needs ports 27000 to 27050 open, and we have those closed up. In order to open those without compromising our network we'd have to set up an entirely separate subnet to play with, and we're pretty busy this time of year. Is there any way to stop Steam from checking for updates so I can play the game?

4. Does Gmod 9 work on the O.B. installations?

5. Is The Orange Box worth the extra $30 over buying a standalone copy of Half-Life? I'm not as interested in Counter Strike as I am Portal.

And of course general opinions are appreciated. Thanks!

[vb_master]

4. Does Gmod 9 work on the O.B. installations?

You can't use any of the Portal, TF2, or EP2 content in-game.

[Kurt_]

It will most certainly run on that graphics card. I'm using a 128 MB Nvidia 6200, and Half-Life 2 runs at full resolution with high/full settings for everything on my Athlon 64 (2Ghz) with a gig of ram.

Half-Life 2: Episode One runs at full resolution with full character textures and low everything else at something like 30-35 fps, but that might because of other factors apart from the graphics card.

Downloading HL:E2 now, should be done for tomorrow. I don't think I'll be able to run it very well...