I got Tf2 last night but im having probs as im getting serious lockups and crashes of the game sometimes within minutes of playing.

I've googled it and see there is a lot of random crashes, though most appear to be linked with Vista and I run xp.

Anyone else had probs? any advice?

Do you have the latest drivers for your gfx card?

Ditto

Mine was crashing on both XP and Vista, upgraded both OS' to the newest WHQL drivers (v.163.19 for nvidia) and now it seems fine.

There was also a patch last night fixing some of the crash issues..

Strange how after that i had a sudden black screen, an alt + tab fixed it but i had a message stating my gfx driver had halted and recovered.

As I posted on the other thread. DO NOT UPGRADE DRIVERS YET.

I had the same issues as you and I'm on XP. Updated drivers for ATI gfx card and all of my steam games wouldn't even launch at all.

What solved it for me was going back to drivers that were quite a few months old. Plays fine now. There's lots of posts on the steam forums about it. Have a read before deciding what to do.

Yeah, mine's been crashing particularly badly since the newest patch.
I run AVG though and it seems there are issues with TF2, so antivirus software (of which AVG is one mentioned) and the non-paged memory pool or allocation, I can't remember which.

Trying a registry fix now that's been suggested.
It's been putting me off launching it, this PC's been 100% stable until I started playing with TF2 and the reboots are very annoying. Especially since we're now playing a released game.

I've had nothing but problems with AVG and steam games, sub ran out a while ago so I just uninstalled it. And everything is pretty like a charm.
I can even use that steam community overlay thingy ingame

The registry fix worked fine for me, stable all last night.
It's:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
PagedPoolSize set it to 10000000 (Hex) that's 256Mb.

I get McAfee enterprise free though work if I actually want to install it but I'm still not sure I want to swap AVG for it... 8.5i is better than previous versions but at work it still seems to impact performance too much.