SA, exe files

I had this and wrote to Dell about it:

"The Dell Support Assistant and Dell Back-up and Recovery have never had Kaspersky ask me before (to my recollection) "If" I wanted to connect to an Unsecured connection.  At first I said no and then I said yes and then I didn't know what to do.  The unsecured connection was:  accman.dellbackupandrecovery.com    I wrote to someone in support at Dell to ask about it and he wrote back with the obvious "that all of Dells resources are Secure".  So I said no to the Kaspersky pop-up after that.  But there is something familiar about that name "accman" that I can't recall."

Has this happened to anyone else?  I think that's about the time that Phobos.exe appeared in my task manager.  It has a whole lot of I/O activity.  It is also a Windows Vista Version like most of the other Dell programs that are stated as for Windows 10?  Are those two OS that close?  At the same time Kaspersky's firewall traffic was moving so fast that if I tried to open more than a 24 hr period, it would freeze-up my computer.  It was sending or receiving multiple-multiple-multiple times a second.  Multiple Times! :Confused:

Is Phobos legit? Or not?

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@revelli wrote:

Thanks @Zinapse.

Please be assured that Phobos.exe is not harmful as it is neither malware nor virus. It is a SupportAssist process which runs in the background along with DSAPI.exe for Dell hardware support. We heard your concern and this file is being renamed to be more product specific and appropriate. We are releasing a hotfix in early June to rename this file.  Thanks for all your feedback.

Thanks,

Dell - Kumar 

#iwork4Dell

 

 

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Then why do I have two running?  The new Phobos and the old SupportAssist.  Windows pointed that out to me in a pop-up.

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@ehjump wrote:

Noticed these files too over here.

Dell of all companies should know that "phobos" is Trojan malware that was discovered in October 2017. See link:

http://www.removemalware.guide/tips-to-uninstall-phobos-ransomware-from-windows-7810

And, phobos means fear in Greek, so of course, I'm afraid.

Dell should either changed the name of the files to actually say Dell or delete them from our PCs. There's already enough junk & bloatware that come with PCs in the first place. Now we have to deal with Dell adding to this mess after owning the PC for more than 3 years?!

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Are you serious about that site?  It looks like a bit of program sales to me.  It's not a secure site and it wants you to use their software. 

This is a Dell Forum-Right?

Well, Thank you all Anyway.

I think it's a valid process I just have to figure why I have two running.

I just noticed that my phobos.exe takes 147.6 MB. It is only scheduled to run at 4:00 AM. I'm trying to use my computer. What could it possibly be doing with all that memory consumption? It almost has a "greedy" feel to it. Ending the task makes it auto-restart at 14.5 MB. Something is wrong. I believe this is called a "memory leak."

Dell Support Assist + its dependencies takes a total of ~350 MB while sitting idle. It is definitely unsatisfactory and deterring. I know that was not the goal, but it is a little sloppy making it one of the reasons some people laugh at Dell. Windows is more elegant than that. This program's footprint can easily be reduced by a relatively large amount.

 Hi 4ustin,

Thanks for bringing the memory usage to our attention. I was also concerned about phobos and dsapi or whatever it is after my supportassist decided to update.

I went into control panel (make sure to choose large icons next to "view by" to bring it out of category view), administrative tools, services, scrolled down to dell hardware support, and disabled that service after stopping it first. That got rid of phobos and dsapi but dell support assist still works fine for my needs which is driver updates. 

Unrelated, but I wonder what the dell data vault stuff is and if I can disable those. 

@moapys , SupportAssist hotfix 2.2.1 was released last week. Please have  SupportAssist updated to 2.2.1 to reflect the changes. Phobos.exe no longer appears, it is now renamed to be more product specific. 

Thanks for all your feedback.

Thanks,

Dell- Kumar

Thanks for your effort, Kumar (ravelli), really appreciate your help around the community. But as you can see around the english or german forum part for example, people are quite angry about the new version 2.2.1.23 which has been updatet silently. Also our new XPS8390s do have problems now since June 12th 2018 and DSA is only freezing instead of working.

When can we expect that DELL will work more reliable in future? Can we at all? If not, all users better have to stop these DELL tasks! Do you see the problem?

Why making a software to help people with troubleshooting, when the software itself always makes troubles? Why?

Please DELL, do work more propperly in the future! It is in your own interest. We do use a lot of DELL computers in our office and we never had big problems during Windows 7 times all the last years. And now, since Windows 10 with all those apps, another app and again an other app, and an app here and an app there...come one... what's going on - because it's presently very frustrating and disappointing for a lot of users.

Many thanks for reading these lines and best regards

Chris

@Sagittarius59 , appreciate your feedback. Thank you for bringing the issue to our attention. Please help with the following details to troubleshoot and resolve it.  Please send me Service tag, log files from the path "%ProgramData%\SupportAssist\Client\Agent\logs\ApplicationLogs\"  and also provide step by step details on "freezing" scenario. 

Thanks,

Dell- Kumar

Dear Kumar

Many thanks for your reply. I am presently at the office with this XPS 8930 computer and I will go to holidays next week, so I will check all these hints and sent feedback to you later when I am back. I also can ask my colleague at work because he has the same issue with his XPS 8930. He has alsos some days off and he isn't around at the moment for sending infos.

So many thanks in advance for your patience. I will check the situation first when I am back after the holidays. Maybe the DSA is then working again. My computer usually is not in use when I am away but from time to time someone at the office needs a free place temporary and if there are hidden updates again, maybe the problems are solved.

Have a good time and best regards!

Chris

Dear Kumar

I am now back from holidays. The problem did still exist first but in the community (thanks to "pauldmich" resp. "Technut.Canada") there was a solution now in renaming a .png file:

"C:\Program Files\Dell\SupportAssistAgent\bin\Resources\New-Dell-Logo-White-Small.png and deleted -Small. Should look like New-Dell-Logo-White.png."

So to all developers at DELL: please do a serious work and make tests yourself before making such faulty updates. And yes (needless to ask) we all make errors ourself, but usually only me or some few others are affected about my own error. The number of users have been affected now I can't count - you surely know it according all the copmplains around the community. At the moment I do not trust to DELL updates anymore. It's up to DELL now!

Many thanks for reading this and I hope you can understand my (our) protest at last a little.

Regards, Chris, Switzerland

Hello, I am running the latest version and seeing the "stuck Loading..." issue described here on my laptop. Is there anything new that needs to be done?