I could run Halo running on my laptop without crashing the OS intermittently. The problem as I knew was due to the incompatibility of my old video driver. Although I installed the required DirectX 9 successfully, the game used to crash when run with all its best features (high graphic details, sound effects and controller support etc.). But if I run it in safe mode it would run fine, but that would be with all main features stripped (no audio - makes no sense in playing Halo without audio, no controller support, poor graphics).
Right solution is to install ATI's latest drivers (latest versions of ATI Catalyst) but I read that it doesn't work unless you reinstall the Windows.
So I decided to run Halo with degenerate graphics, but I wanted other features intact. After a bit of googling I came to know that Halo.exe could be run from command line with various commandline options and that way you could choose what features to drop.
Here is the link
Here are the options that I use E:\Halo\halo.exe -novideo -useff -console