Steam locks up my pc when updating games

[ARMORED my TROOPER till I VOTOMS]

Whenever I try to update a game, or download one, I have a 75% chance that

it downloads a little bit, then drops to 0mb/s. Nothing happens at all, if only the download ETA keeps growing.
When this happens I can move the mouse but no matter what I click, nothing happens, nothing opens, closes, task manager won't open, ctrl-alt-del does nothing and so on.

At that point I can either wait 10 minutes to over an hour steam either starts downloading and frees my PC, or I get some "corrupted downloaded files" or "content server unreachable" error stopping the download.

Also when it downloads, it seems to either try to install the game twice/file check multiple times in a row. With multiple lock ups happening intermittently.

This only happens with steam, as any download on any other launcher goes well.
It happens to all sizes of games and updates.

So far I have:

reinstalled steam
integrity checked games
disabled windows defender and tried downloading
updated all my drivers
cleared download cache
ran some CMD I found on an old steam forum post that seemed like a similar ish issue
changed internet connections

and more I forgot


Has this happened to anyone else? and if so, how did you fix it?

[crunchyfrog]

Likely something on your PC is overloading.

The part about Steam downlloading a bit then driopping to zero is normal - that's how it's supposed to work.

Many people don't seem to get how Steam downloads as it's a bit different to most other places. Steam downloads files encrypted and compressed.

For this reason it means that it isn't just your net connection that determines the speed. It's your CPU, RAM, I/O, hard drives and more.

Because it has to download a chunk, unpack it, sort it then write the final result to it's final resting place, this means it will stop and start and use loads of resources. What's more you need to make sure you never use more than about 90% of your hard drive's space and allow up to three times the total download space for your file(s). If you go over this it WILL slow down as your computer is desperately trying to eke space out.

You can find out what's causing the issues though easily enough - use the Steam downloads page to keep watching the download but open Task Manager as well and monitor the system resources. If you notice any of the RAM, CPU, I/O, etc getting hit hard, there's your bottleneck.