Is My Power Supply Unit Dying?

[oochab]

Hi,

Just a bit of background first, I have a desktop PC (about 5-6 years old) at my parent's house which I use during the weekends only (as I live in my own flat near work during the week).

The last couple of months, it seems to be getting slightly slower at turning on, but once fully loaded it seems to work as normal. I thought this was just down to age so thought nothing of it.

However, this weekend, I tried to download a game on steam. It started the download OK, then I went onto the "Manage downloads" section on steam so that I could view the progress of the download and after a short while, the disk status icon (on steam) changed from green (disk idle) to red (disk busy), then the downloading stopped and my PC froze.

I turned it off and tried again, the same thing happened.

I then took off the side of my PC and the graphics card seemed to be quite hot (as if it was overheated?) and the fan inside the PSU wasn't working until I just gave it a little tap.

I removed the dust from inside the PC (whilst it was turned off obviously) and gave it another go. It then started up slowly and before I could start the download again, my PC suddenly restarted (or something similar) but my monitor was just black so I could see what was happening, so I just turned it off.

Obviously something is wrong here, but I'm sure it's not my graphics card as there didn't seem to be any problems related to it (other than it being slightly hot, but that may have been it's usual temperature?).

Also, I did a memory diagnostic on my hard drive and found no problems there either which leaves the motherboard or the PSU. I'm pretty certain it would be the motherboard either.

So, could a dying PSU cause my PC to become slow at starting up and crash in this scenario or could it be something else?

Note:- I don't have the specs of my PC to hand as I'm not at my parent's house during the week and I can't remember exactly what they are off the top of my head (I'm not sure they're important in this scenario anyway?).

Any help much appreciated.
Thanks

...Just a thought, could this problem have been caused by my PC only starting up 1-2 days a week (just sits there unused throughout the week) or doesn't that matter?
@sirjester099 It might be malware, cookies etc slowing down my PC but that wouldn't cause crashes, my graphics card to heat up would it? It definitely wouldn't be the cause of the fan in the PSU to stop working.

[sirjester099]

It is probably maleware, cookies, junk that is cluttered up on your hard drive. Chances are you need to reinstall your Windows

[john]

It sounds like a simple solution would be to add an extra fan to blow air through the psu.
DONT open the PSU, just fit it to the outside of the psu case..

Graphics cards do run hot, not a problem.

Steam relies on an internet connection; if that is slow or disturbed

The last couple of months, it seems to be getting slightly slower at turning on
maybe you have installed something that runs at start-up?

Run Glary utilities to repair registry tc.
http://openhardwaremonitor.org/ to check temperatures
run a speed test on your internet

check the other fans they may need replacing if they are old.