Hey everyone! I'm running into a really frustrating problem with my PC and was wondering if anyone could possibly give insight as to why this is happening.

Recently, I've been noticing my entire computer freezing up, applications and games crashing, and the PC becoming basically inoperable. After some messing with things, it seems to only be happening when Steam patches something. The patch will download just fine, but as soon as it says 'patching', the computer locks up (applications freeze and become uninteractable, games entirely lag out, etc), the ETA to finish climbs infinitely up (I have seen it get to >1 year on a few occasions), and the patch refuses to finish. If I manage to wrestle my way to the pause button the computer slowly returns to normal. This happens no matter what drive the game is downloaded to (I have tried different games on different drives) and doesn't seem to happen when installing a game through a service other than Steam.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I've turned off automatic updates for now, but this means that I cannot play any game that gets an update. This same computer had an issue about a month and a half back where the SSD the OS was installed on spontaneously died and couldn't be recovered, so I'm beginning to wonder if this PC is just at the end of its life.