backups
PLUS every every time before going to my texture browser! 
You can limit crashing in the texture browsing by slowing sown the scrolling. Still sucks that it does that, Not sure if its the majority of textures being 1024x1024 causing of it.
Yeah man, sometimes that works but many times I can't even see a first page fill with textures when it crashes already, so no time to even scroll a milimeter... If this is related to memory resources for example, is there any way to allow the P2AT grab a much RAM as it needs?
useful tools and stuff here on TWP 
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yea i do that everytime i'm about to open the properties window of a brush or entity or when i've made a small change.. 
I basically hit Ctrl + S always; I even notice I press it after I moved my camera elsewhere
I press it every 5 seconds and 4 seconds, 2 seconds, 1 second....
Same here. ^^
I don't know. It's like your mind thinks that you did something while changing the camera, so, you have to save what you did.
Quick tip on the topic: it really looks like the hammer editor gets overloaded when it needs to render much information... so basically the cordon tool allows you to avoid so much crashing when building a big map I've been mapping for like 3 hours now without a single crash after searching/filtering for textures/models a bunch of times >.<
useful tools and stuff here on TWP [spoiler]
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Wait, 3 hours without a crash is good? I mean Hammer does crash a lot, but I don't remember it being that bad for me..
Or maybe it just sounds too ridiculous to believe if we say it out aloud like that
With my old laptop I was happy with one crash every 30 minutes
There's a reason why I constantly press Ctrl S...
I actually turned off autosave, because I save every 10 seconds anyways. Sometimes I try to press ctrl+s even in the web browser
But it seems that packing up some ram does help making Hammer a bit more stable. (Duh!) I have 16 GB and I don't crash too-too much. Sometimes with the texture browser or if I open up a big map next to some other big maps, but it isn't so bad, that I have to call 3 hours without a crash an achievement.
(Though I haven't done too many big mapping sessions in a while, so it might just be time making things a bit nicer than they actually are)