1 1/2 days? doubt it... maybe an hour to 4 hours with cable.

Depends on the speed of the Cable Connection.

When I beta tested SW:Galaxies it took well over 10 hours to DL and my cable connection at that time was pulled down large files with no complaints. The problem I'm looking forward to is Steam choking on so many users that nobody can get the game even after it's available causing even more undue delay in getting a completed game in the hands of those who most deserve to have it...THE GAMERS!!! (sounds really negative but I think if Steam survives the initial onslaught of a massive DL then perhaps Newell et al have done things right for once and Steam may outlive it's less than stellar reputation).

I think your forgetting about the other 10,000ish amount of people that have the cards. And for the fact that it took me a full 24 hours to download the works off of steam (barely breaks 1.7gb), that's where I based my assumption. Yes, steam does have some good hosts... but they randomly pick them for you. Some may have 20~50kb/s, some may have 100+.

Let's not forget about the day steam came out officially. It took most people 3~4 days to get cs 1.6, and the content servers went down like flies. Obviously they learned what went wrong there, and may/may not have fixed it.

EDIT*

(10,000 people having the cards is just my estimate. After saying it, it sounds a bit high... but I'll stick with it.)

i don't want to offend any doomers out there or anything but HL2 is going to rock its ass. after playing doom 3 i realized that i had much more fun with the HL2 "beta." It's just more fun to be able to shoot EVERYTHING and have it react then only a limited number of things. dont get me wrong DOom3 is a BAD ASS but it hasn't ruined my anticipation

Yeah Doom 3 hasn't ruined my anticipation of HL2. If anything, it has only built it that much more. From what I've seen in the movies, the much greater depth of interactivity, (i.e. the total interaction with your environment as well as NPCs) will blow Doom 3 out of the water and make me hope that whoever licenses the Doom 3 engine can make a game as rich in story and interactivity as the graphics already are.

Okay, so I'm pretty excited about HL2 since I loved the first one... and I heard that the "pre-load" has started yesterday over "Steam." Could someone fill me in on what the hell this means? What is "Steam" and what does it do?

Steam is basically Valve's way of distributing content. As soon as a patch or game is ready, they upload it to Steam and make it instantly available for download. It also acts as a server browser. And the preload is just Valve releasing content early so that the downloads get spread out over a period of time, keep in mind you can't actually play it until Valve decrypts it. On another note the Half Life 2 preload got delayed... Valve can't seem to hold a date for anything.

Everything's so... smooth :)

ok, yea, you are going to have to tell us more than that, what's smooth? gameplay? FPS? download speed? If you are gonna make a short post, make sure all relevant information is in it.