SupportAssist Failure

Question

Quite honestly I am flabbergasted that a company as theoretically sophisticated as Dell cannot resolve an issue for a piece of software that the company provides to 'assist' users in evaluating the functionality of its hardware.  I have had ongoing problems with this worthless program for the past six months.  Customer service agents have uninstalled it and reinstalled it three times and have walked me through uninstalling and reinstalling myself three times (which really irritates me as I pay Dell for premium service to fix these kind of problems).  Shortly after reinstalling (sometimes it works once, maybe twice, the program fails to launch again.  I pay for premium support to have Dell FIX these kind of problems, yet in six months, no one from Dell has any idea what the fix is.  I have been informed that this has been escalated to the level 3 team and they too have not resolved the issue.  Now it has been escalated to the engineering team and they have not responded.  It takes days for anyone from Dell to respond to support requests and the answer is always, 'we will escalate this and someone will get back to you in 24-48 hours.'  What an absolute joke.   I have tried fixes on my own, none of which work including one that seemed to work for many and that was removing the word 'small' in the Program File description line.  IF anyone has a real fix for this, I would be fascinated to hear about it as so far, I have found nothing that works.  I have decided that if nothing is resolved by the end of this month, I will just delete this worthless offering by Dell and rely on other means to check my computer components.  I don't mind paying for service, but I dearly hate to pay a premium fee for premium service and get none.  Any suggestions now?  Hopefully, someone from Dell occasionally reads these posts and sees that there are hundreds if not thousands of people having the same problem who are all Dell consumers...yes, we all bought Dell products, and we are not happy with the way Dell has failed to address this problem.

jbilinski · Accepted Answer

Tuesday and Wednesday we noticed an issue with expired certificates. External Customers were unable to perform functions for Detect PC, Drivers Scan or Diagnostics on recent Support Assist installs or unable to install due to catalog\lost internet connection message. This was fixed yesterday. If you need to reinstall follow these instructions

Uninstall SupportAssist via the Control Panel if available

Then delete these directories

C:\ProgramData\PCDr

C:\ProgramData\SupportAssist

C:\Program Files\Dell\SupportAssistAgent (if able to)

Try installing via Dell web-site, download and right click and run as administrator

https://downloads.dell.com/serviceability/catalog/SupportAssistInstaller.exe

if the above doesn’t work please use MSI / MSP installers as a workaround. (see below).

Steps

I have tried following given steps just now – to make sure they work. It should work fine- Please try executing following steps.

Download MSI from https://downloads.dell.com/serviceability/Catalog/SupportAssistx64-3.1.0.142.msi
Open cmd prompt > run as administrator
Execute cmd (example)–

“msiexec /i “downloaded msi file path with the name” /qb /l*v c:\msilog.txt

If it fails to install - share the msiinstall log.

If it is successful,

Download MSP from https://downloads.dell.com/serviceability/Catalog/SupportAssistx64-3.1.0.142.msp
Execute cmd (example)–

“msiexec /p “downloaded msp file path with the name” /qb /l*v c:\msplog.txt

If it fails to install, share the msplog.txt file.

For Example Run

MSI

msiexec /i C:\Users\DELL_JoeB\Downloads\SAC3.1.0.142\SupportAssistx64-3.1.0.142.msi /qb /l*v c:\msilog.txt

MSP

msiexec /p C:\Users\DELL_JoeB\Downloads\SAC3.1.0.142\SupportAssistx64-3.1.0.142.msp /qb /l*v c:\msplog.txt

jbilinski · Accepted Answer

@mcd111 - or try this... open up notepad paste these three comments below and save as salaunch.bat on your desktop or a location. Then just double click on salaunch.bat

cd\

cd C:\Program Files\Dell\SupportAssistAgent\bin

SupportAssistUI.exe Launch

DELL-Nikhil K · Answer

Hi mcd11,

We have identified as internal defect and this is very specific to Operating system build.

Currently you can use command prompt for launching SupportAssist and it will work perfectly fine.

Refer below steps for command prompt method:-

1. Launch command prompt as administrator.

2. Type - cd C:\Program Files\DELL\SupportAssist\bin

3. Type - SupportAssistUI.exe launch

Let me know if above steps works for you or not.

Thanks

NikhilKiroula

#iwork4Dell

mcd111 · Answer

I tried Administrative Prompt with the following results:With your message, I could not tell exactly where spaces were, so I tried several options....none worked.&#xa0; Got any other ideas?

jbilinski · Answer

See attached image

mcd111 · Answer

I copied and pasted the info onto Notepad.  Saved as the .bat file as you indicated.  Double clicked on it from my desktop and the SupportAssist program came up, but does just as it has time after time after time....sits with the four black/grey dots going round and round and never starting.  Followed by a message with white dots going in a line saying, 'Were still working on it.  Hold on.'  The exact same message I have been getting for months and months.  Sorry, your solution does not solve this problem.  I think the problem is that this is a piece of software, if you will pardon my words.

PX03AFK · Answer

I just tried the command prompt way of starting the SupportAssist and it worked.  I then modified the shortcut to add 'launch' as a parameter and that works as well.  So the problem seems to be that the UI exe needs a parameter that isn't being planted into the shortcut

SupportAssist for PCs

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