XPS8300/Win 7 Ultimate/Dell PC Checkup and PC Doctor

Yes it should, I just tried on my older Dell laptop which is downloading a 51 Mb file. On the XPS 8300 which had the software installed it just updated.

natakuc4

Thanks for that information. I uninstalled Support Centre, cranked up aulauncher and it downloaded the whole suite, which seems to work OK.

Looking at the date of the original Support centre/PC Checkup installation, it was installed at the time I first started up the system. I remember getting a bit annoyed because "something" in excess of 50mb was automatically downloaded (I presumed either Dell or Microsoft -  loads of updates from them pending for a new machine) and then crashed out of installation with insufficient privileges.

Looking at the Application errors log, it appears that the Support Centre installed corruptly - enough to show up in the installed software but missing some vital components to run properly without erroring and hanging.

I do hate it when things like updates turn up on the system automatically, without adequate info and progress reporting, let alone definitive source information, and subsequently cause problems without having given you enough to track down the problem.

This is still a problem in that PC-Doctor crashes with 3 different Errors in the log, and then hangs up any subsequent shutdown with a couple of processes that seem unkillable.

The PC Doctor crashes or the Dell Support Centre crashes.

Maybe PC Doctor cannot run when the Dell Support Centre is on in the background.

Since the Dell Support Centre is powered by PC Doctor, it is possible they are both fighting over the same processes or something strange.

I'm not sure. 

I'm not absolutely sure which crashes which. What happens is that when the Support Centre window appears, the timer is constantly active when the cursor is hovered over that window.

There are 2 processes shown in Task Manager, one being DSC and the other PC Doctor. I presume that DSC spawns the other. It seems also that DSC sets itself up for scheduled runs, as today it suddenly cranked into action, froze as noted above and then stopped another backup process I was running.

DSC can be killed in Task Manager, but PC Doctor seems unstoppable. Although I have another suite of proprietary software which includes a utility to kill all non-responding programs on shutdown, PCD also appears immune to this.

The net result is that the machine hangs on shutdown, and can only be restarted by a power of/on (leaving a kernel error in the logs, of course). Generally the restart goes straight to the Safe Mode etc options, and I usually go for Safe Mode and then shutdown/restart as normal from there.

On occasion I have done a read-only Chkdsk and found errors in the file system caused by an improper shutdown, and of course a boot/repair Chkdsk on 1.5 tb of disk takes hours.

Quite frankly, a system manufacturer's utility such as Dell Support centre which performs as badly as this and causes so many problems is worse than useless and I have therefore uninstalled it.

I also see elsewhere that the system checkup in PC Doctor isn't very reliable and that the boot-time checkup and diagnostics are the one that really matter.

It would be good if someone from Dell were to interest him/herself in this.

Well I have almost the same system/configuration as you and have ran Dell Support Centre without PC Doctor installed and have experienced no problems with it.

So I would suggest/guess it is better to run without the other as they are more or less trying to do the same thing.

Can't comment so much as I have never used PC Doctor. 

This isn't an isolated incident, I have 2 Dell PCs that are have the same problem since the Dell Support Center installed an update a few weeks ago.  I have a Dell XPS M1530 laptop running Vista SP2 & a Dell XPS Studio 9000 running Windows 7 Ultimate SP1.  After the Dell Support Center installed an automatic update, when the PC Checkup software runs it now reports that a disk failure is imminent and the disk should be replaced soon.  This seems Real suspicious to me.

Can we get someone from Dell Tech Support to look into this?

Try this and see if it helps

Uninstall Dell Support Center

Rick

Ken Ferguson,

You need a second opinion. Try...

How to Run the Dell™ Diagnostics Utility

The error codes there will tell you is the hard drive is failing. Run the full diagnostics. There is a member here that know each code and what it means.

Rick

Omg, I send my <3 to you ^^ I've been having the same problem, and I've been trying to find time to back stuff up (yep, way too full, and way too little time) I really am worried about this, and I really hope Tech Support responds to this!

I've done pretty much as PudgyOne recommends i.e. uninstall Support Centre etc. and aim to use the F12 Boot diagnostics instead.

My past experience is that a number of so-called uptime-run diagnostic programs, like the Seagate ones for disks, are often not very accurate or informative, and that the Boot diagnostics are the ones to use.

I thought that after a few months I would download Dell Support Centre and PC-Doctor and see if anything has changed. Well, it hasn't. My XPS8300 system still hangs.

It seems that DSC or PCDR involves a process pc(something or the other).p5x. When the main programs become unresponsive, it is possible to use Task Manager or PROCEXP64 to kill them. However, neither of these works on the p5x process i.e. it is unkillable.

If, having killed the main process and then restarted DSC, then killed it again, another unkillable p5x is there (same name, same size). As far as I can see this could be endlessly repeated with p5x processes building up each time.

On system shutdown, it seems clear that Windows cannot close or terminate the p5x, so the shutdown hangs and can only be achieved by a power-off i.e. a deliberate system crash with all the possible consequences of dirty bits, corrupt data and so forth.

In the end, I uninstalled DSC and PC-Dr.