I'm trying to get support assist to install onto a few Dell E6230's however on the install it flashes up and then instantly disappears, is it supported by Windows 7? (Tried Windows 10 but the laptops are too slow), is there any extra software needed or am I just out of luck?

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.

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)

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!

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?)

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?

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?

I had installed the latest version of SupportAssist on my Inspiron laptop but I can't seem to find the app anywhere. When i tried to reinstall, it says that it is already updated to latest version. I did however managed to find its location under

C:\Program Files\Dell\SupportAssistAgent

But when i tried to open SupportAssist.exe under the "bin" subfolder, it just opens up cmd for a bit and then closes on its own. Thats it.

Is Dell planning to kill this app? I mainly use it to update drivers amongst other features. As a workaround, I'm using the Dell Update application for driver updates. Perhaps Dell is replacing SA with Dell Update?

Hello

I mostly live in the Mac world, so this is a newb question. I noticed my XPS17 gets updates through Windows Update, but also can get updates through Dell Support Assist. The problem is they seem to be updating each other. Dell Support assist will update driver X, then Windows Update will update Driver X, and around we go.

Is it best to have driver updates through Dell Support Assist or Windows?

Thank you!

(It says 152 min)

Just wanted to know if it's worth leaving my laptop overnight.

Edit: It's done! It took 412 minutes (~7 hours)

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.

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

Dell confirms its SupportAssist software causes Windows BSOD crashes
Public confirmation from Dell didn't come until 12 hours after we had pushed a fix internally.

It took one replaced laptop and multiple hours of after-hours troubleshooting with frustrated employees to get to the bottom of this one. Admittedly had I looked harder at the logs, I would have seen the SupportAssist critical failure, but having been a hectic MSP week my brain processed it as SupportAssist detecting a problem prior to the crash, rather than being the cause.

First ticket comes in with BSOD every 37 minutes on the dot -- chkdsk, dism, sfc, the works don't fix it, so we replace with plans to reimage later.

Second ticket comes in much later in the day, "computer rebooting every 30 minutes!"
"Oh no"

Before I could get a chance to even check the second ticket we get a wave of employees reporting the same thing, expressing that it had been happening all day. At this point pattern recognition kicks in and I recognize there must be something pushing, like a bad Windows Update or Dell Command Driver Update. I take my time running through all of those, running Windows built in reinstall, the works -- nothing.

After the failed windows reinstall and a beer later I go back to the error logs and start comparing devices.

0xEF_DellSupportAss_BUGCHECK_CRITICAL_PROCESS_c0000005_DellSupportAss!unknown_function

That's gotta be fuckin it right? Let's just wipe Dell SupportAssist entirely and see how it goes. 38 minutes later? Computer is still online. Lets gooooo.

Fuck you Dell. I haven't forgotten about your failure to fix the bios issues causing crashing with specific Nvidia cards on your XPS 8930, and I won't forget this. Lenovo is looking pretty juicy.

Today I had constant BSODs with "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED" messages - after some digging through reliability manager I found the cause to be the Dell Service. The problem went away after disabling the service.

Looks like it's more widespread:

https://www.neowin.net/news/dell-pcs-are-running-into-constant-bsod-reboot-loops-and-windows-11-isnt-the-culprit/

It told me i had to do some updates, but its taking so long, its been stuck on this screen at 77% for at least an hour, what do i do? if i delete supportassistant will it cause any issues?

I have bought a brand new Dell ryzen 5 hexacore 7530 u.

And I noticed that my disc c is basically having 31.0 gb free out of 116gb.

I want to know the bloatware that I can safely delete.

Please Help

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.

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?