If you’re looking for a case study in how not to design support software, Dell SupportAssist is it. This application is not just bad—it’s astonishingly, unbelievably terrible.

First, let’s talk performance. SupportAssist is supposed to optimize your system, but what it actually does is hijack your CPU, stall basic operations, and make your computer feel like it’s running on Windows 95 or ms-dos. Every scan takes forever, and even when it claims to fix things, the results are laughable—phantom updates, false positives, and repeated “issues” that never go away.

Then there’s the user interface. It’s bloated, laggy, and often fails to load properly. Want to update drivers? Prepare for a game of roulette, where sometimes it works, sometimes it crashes, and sometimes it tells you you’re up to date—only to have Dell’s own website list five outdated drivers moments later.

To add insult to injury, SupportAssist has been known to introduce vulnerabilities in the past, turning your system’s “support tool” into a security liability. That alone should’ve been enough to retire the program permanently.

Dell is a reputable brand with solid hardware, but SupportAssist drags down the entire experience. It’s not just unhelpful—it’s counterproductive. You’re better off uninstalling it and manually managing your system with the Dell website or third-party tools that actually work.

In short: avoid at all costs. This isn’t support—it’s sabotage.

RANT OVER

If it's just for installing OEM-released drivers, I think both Dell Update and SupportAssist will do the trick. But Dell customer service will almost always recommend SupportAssist. According to my experience, SA takes up more space and RAM than Dell Update, and the probability of SA crashing is higher than Dell Update. On my device, SA keeps crashing, especially when multiple tasks are running at the same time, whereas Dell Update never crashes.

I am using Dell Inspiron 15. Recently the Support Assistant is telling me to renew the service contract. It says you have only 44 days left. It takes me to a website and tells to me fill up some info, which I have already done a few days ago. And nothing happens. Besides the support assistant is too much slow on my laptop. It feels useless but sometimes Idk I get some updates from here that’s why I have kept it.

Hello everyone, so I have been messing with Dell laptops for over a year now and a utility Dell offers is Support Assist. I have never downloaded it on any of the machines, but instead, I have Dell Command update.

So I guess I’m here to ask, is Support Assist better than Command Update? Also, what features does Support Assist offer that you have seen beneficial for yourself? I guess I am trying to justify if it should be downloaded when we image the laptops or a case by case basis.

(FYI, the laptops are all under warranty)

Hi Dell community,

I'm reaching out to see if anyone else is experiencing the same issue or has found a solution to the problem I'm currently facing in my environment. We recently deployed a few laptops with Dell SupportAssist installed, and it's causing significant performance degradation for some users. When checking in Task Manager, Support Assist is consistently consuming around 90% of the memory usage.

I'm curious to know what solutions others have found to combat SupportAssist causing this issue. Additionally, I'm considering whether to disable it or, as a more drastic measure, perform a remote uninstall of SupportAssist on all laptops in my network.

Any advice or insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help!

Side note:( What is Support assist used for? and will it cause a negative impact on the devices on my network that have support assist if i do a mass uninstall of support assist on my network?)

ETA: A little over 24 hours later, it now seems to be working normally? So weird...

TL;DR: Can no longer manually install drivers from Dell Drivers and Downloads webpage on Dell PCs without SupportAssist being installed first - uninstalling SupportAssist makes the driver list break once again.

I am not sure if this has been discussed before, but please go easy on me as I am just a lowly service desk technician that is trying to wrap my head around a potential problem before it starts.

At my job, we manage and deploy Dell Latitudes (7000 series) for laptops and once in a while, Dell OptiPlex and Precision desktops. During our imaging process, we disable Dell SupportAssist as the PC drives are encrypted and we do not want the user to update the BIOS with BitLocker enabled (again, just a lowly service desk technician simply following the imaging process given by our desktop/systems admin). Once the imaging has completed and at the login screen, all non-OS updates are downloaded directly from Dell's website, including maintenance/troubleshooting post-deployment. This means bypassing the "recommended" action of checking for updates with Dell SupportAssist and using the collapsible menu for the complete list of drivers, and that has worked up...until now.

I was working with an end user that has a Latitude 7340 laptop that needed a Wi-Fi driver update, so following the procedure mentioned above, I went to the website to download the Wi-Fi driver for the specific service tag, except I was greeted with a spinning blue circle for much longer than it normally takes when opening the list. Of course, the typical technician thought process is to swap browsers or try a private browser, check network connection, restart, but nothing was working. However, when I tried my smartphone, the webpage - including the driver list loaded like it normally does...weird.

I try another Dell Latitude (7330) and was getting the same result. I kept the page open on the 7330 just to try and time it while the other Latitude hopped on a chat with Dell, asking if their website was down. After 15, 20, 30+ minutes pass on the 7330 with no luck, I check all the boxes with the Dell support rep that there is no issue with anti-virus software, network, or VPN. The rep eventually had me boot up the 7330 in Safe Mode w/ Networking - still got the spinning blue circle of death, but the rep assuring me that the website was up and reachable. To confirm this, I also went ahead and tried loading the site on a 4th and 5th device - my personal iPad and our office testing MacBook Air. Oddly still, both loaded the driver list just fine. I ended up downloading the driver I needed to a flash drive from the MacBook in case it never loaded on the Dell laptops.

While this was going on, my coworker came in and started testing everything I was testing on his own machine (another Latitude in the 7000 series) after I briefed him on what was going on and everything we'd done so far. He also got the spinning blue circle of death, but he noticed that if he searched asset tags for other Dell equipment - such as monitors and printers - the driver list loaded right away. It gave him an idea - for kicks, he went with Dell's "recommended" option and downloaded the .exe. file for SupportAssist. Lo and behold, after installing SupportAssist, he refreshed the driver list page for both the Latitude 7330 I was testing and the 7340 that needed the Wi-Fi driver, and it loaded right away.

Again, maybe this has been discussed before and I missed it somewhere, but I tried the same thing on the Latitudes I was working with (at this point, the Dell rep said something about this being an out of warranty service call, so I got annoyed and ended the chat), and it worked again. I downloaded what I needed and thankfully was able to remove SupportAssist and all the bloatware it came with swiftly, but is now going to be a thing? I'm going to test this again with my personal Dell Laptop (Dell Inspiron 7567), and if it happens on mine, then I know something has changed on their end. Has anyone else experienced this recently?

ETA: Also, as SOON as I uninstalled SupportAssist, the driver list is back to not loading!

In the enterprise space we've used the Dell Command/Update tool for many years to identify, download and install updated drivers. It's always worked pretty well. We generally push software updates through SCCM (Config Manager), but, in most cases prefer to be a more careful when updating drivers (especially bios, chipset and network drivers), as those have a greater potential to take a system offline. We'll push drivers through SCCM when it's critical. Otherwise updating drivers in person when convenient or when troubleshooting issues seems to work for us.

So apparently Dell Command/Update is being deprecated for Dell Support Assist. Support Assist is *terrible*!!!!! It's obviously oriented to consumers, not enterprise. It crashes or just quits working randomly. Lately it's been asking for permission to scan the entire local subnet !? Ummm, no (I'm not sending Dell marketing all the info about the devices on my corporate network)? It also randomly fails when attempting to update some drivers and requires restarting and retrying.

Are we the only ones finding Support Assist extremely substandard?

Title says it all. Dell fucked up my PC last night (bit of an older model, 17R2) by pushing out an update for supportassist that made my pc freeze up and test the fans (left, then right) like it would in the real fan test. Basically, they fucked up something THEY made. Guess what was causing it? Dell Data Vault (part of supportassist) and when I deleted supportassist? It magically fixed.

This doesn't seem to be the first time I've seen this happen. I used it to scan computer hardware before, and the memory usage reached 90%. But now I'm not running any Dell software, so what could use up 24GB of RAM?

Dell Support Assist usually helps monitor your system for hardware failures and it will report the same to Dell as well. SupportAssist for PCs is a smart technology designed to avoid troubleshooting and disruptions using automated, proactive, and predictive support.

I have been having a problem with disk space, and High Ram and CPU Usage because of these Dell programs that are tied into this DellSupportAssist program that when Uninstalled, somehow pops back up forcing all my other programs to hard lag.

Can Someone please help me here.

Well, my laptop (G5-5505 SE) kept freezing these days, opened task manager and lo and behold - this bugger was using more than half of my RAM, easily going to around 10G Ram usage at times.

Uninstalled the app and the problems seem to have stopped, but my question still stands.

I just got a Dell XPS 15 2023 (9530) laptop.

Question regarding where to get Dell driver / software updates:

What is the best place / way to get them?

1. Dell Support Assist? (see side note at bottom of this post)

2. Dell support page with my laptop's service tag detected / entered? https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/servicetag/XXXXXXXXX.

3. Dell Command Update? Is this the same as the 'Dell Update' app that came with the PC? It does not say 'Command' in the app name...

4. Another method (app or page) to get driver updates?

Any suggestions on the BEST way to get Dell driver / software updates reliably / without issues would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Interesting 'Dell Update' finds an update for 'Chipset | Intel Management Engine Components Installer from 2023. But when I click on Other Available Versions, it shows 2024 versin: 2407.5.59.0, A0908 May 2024

I installed the 2024 one last night, but it still keeps finding the OLDER 2023 one and listing it as an 'available update' for my Dell service tag.

Side note 1: Oddly, My Dell actually has TWO Dell Support Assist apps!

(Notice the slight difference in the app names below) of very different sizes (one under 400 MB and one over 600MB):

'Support Assist' (with Dell as publisher)

'Dell Support Assist' (with Dell as publisher)

OPTIONAL READING BELOW:

Next steps to get Support Assist working (while waiting for other app / method suggestions 1 - 4 above):

Side note - Oddly I do not even see the 'SupportAssistAgent' service running under 'Services' (using Task Manager). The Dell article below mentions this service.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000200106/driver-detection-not-available-message-during-automated-driver-scan

I am uninstalling both the apps above ('Support Assist' and 'Dell Support Assist') and going to install ONE OF them ONCE more since it is not working properly (worked fine at the beginning of May) and then rebooting the system and going to to the support web site and triggering 'Check for Updates'; this triggers a fresh installation of SupportAssist.

When I clean installed Windows 11 and on top of that tried to install Supportassist, it is not installing completely. Is anyone else having the same issues? I tried installing Dell Update and Command update and both are working perfectly and installed all the drivers. Which one should I keep? I am asking this because as per the manual Dell Update is compatible with my system and not command update.

I just recently acquired a laptop from the Dell Inspirion 15 3000 series (a i15-3583) and, despite the complaints of this series that I've seen, it's been quite useful for now, but I want to know if the SupportAssist that comes with it is useful or if I should just ignore it.

If it's not worth using, what is an alternative to not let garbage pile up?

We purposely remove that general Support Assist program from our Dell computers because it has always been problematic. Instead we utilize Dell Command Update for general driver and system updates.

However, recently we've noticed that Dell Command Update is installing something called Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery Plugin. Here is what Dell says about it: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000177401/restore-your-system-using-dell-supportassist-os-recovery

I'm just curious if any of you have noticed this, if you let Command Update install it, if you have actually used it and find it valuable... or if you just deselect it or uninstall it?