Dell Support Centre SupportSoft Error

My Dell Inspiron 530, 4 years old, has started to hang occasionally on startup. The Event Viewer records an Error at every startup, which says "The SupportSoft Sprocket Service (dellsupportcenter) service failed to start due to the following error: The system cannot find the file specified." I've discovered that this relates to a file c:\program files\Dell Support Centre\bin\sprtsvc.exe  -  and I find this file does not exist:  in fact, there is no folder "bin" at all. Any ideas what to do?

Hi, For a system as old as yours, you don't need the dell support Centre. What you can do is to delete it, and you should have no more problems. 

Dell came out with a new version of Support Center in January (has a red toolbox icon).   The SupportSoft service is part of the older version (bluish wrench icon).  If you had it running, I'm thinking the older version may have detected the update and tried to install it, but didn't finish and/or didn't clean out the older one completely.

As Robin suggested, go into Add Remove and remove all versions of Dell Support or Dell Support Center.   If it won't remove, or isn't listed, there may be other ways to clean it out.  I agree you don't need it, and on older computers the new version seems to be a bit buggy, but if you want to try it again you can always download a new copy from Dell's support site.

A quick and dirty temporary solution, just to get rid of the error:   Start - RIGHT CLICK My Computer, Manage, Services and Applications on the left, then Services on the right.  Find the SupportSoft Sprocket service, click stop, then set startup type to disabled.   Then Apply, OK.

Alexandra, Robin

Many thanks for your advices.  Deleting Support Centre solves the Error problem, as you say.  I do quite like the Support Centre, though - a useful quick checker of the system:  so I might try downloading the new version and see if that behaves

Cheers

Arthur