m15, SupportAssist or BIOS issue?

My Alienware m15 started having similar problems after a SupportAssist "upgrade" (?!) in November, 2019. During occasional boot-up, get a VERY loud beep, a SupportAssist "hardware scan" screen that wants to test my fans for 30 seconds, and the CPU and GPU fans running full speed. And as if that is not annoying enough, when the scan finishes and the laptop finishes booting into Windows 10, the fans NEVER SLOW DOWN. I have to restart the laptop to get the fans back down to a sane noise level. My solution to this issue was to turn off this SupportAssist garbage in the BIOS. (Hit the F2 button during bootup to get the BIOS setup screen, select the "SupportAssist [something?] Recovery" option, choose "Disable", F10 to save and reboot). I have been forced to repeat this task every time I let Alienware Update install any "upgrades". From what I'm seeing online, this SupportAssist misbehavior has been afflicting various Alienware laptop models for YEARS.

I get exactly the same issue on my m15. Bios is now at 2.4.1. Will try the solution mentioned. If the fans continue to run at full speed after reboot I do the F12 diagnostics test and all tests pass and the fans become normal again, even though SupportAssist seems to think there is still a problem. This product is a complete mess. The Dell Software and AWCC in particular is poor. AWCC crashes many times a day so my reliability history is permanently at 1. If you don't change AWCC permissions to full control for the user then often it won't start up (as waiting for permission) and then the PC fans don't work and a BSOD will occur. Often it says on boot no AlienFX found.. but it is an Alienware m15. Without spending a few months tinkering with Throttlestop to get the best balance between performance and thermals I would say that this machine out of the box is a complete disaster.  Never will touch anything from Dell or Alienware again.

 

Same issue, support assist saying fan is not working, already cleaned the fans by removing them, same issue, this happened after I updated support assist.

I have a alienware m15 R1, less than a year with it already hate it. I agree with the other comments, never buying an alienware laptop ever again, 180W charger not enough to the power consumption, and the reasons why this laptop is so bad I will comment below.

1.- Alienware Command Center keeps updating constantly, but never fixing it self, takes longer than an antivirus to let you choose how noisy you want your alienware to be today. The application is often pointless, and less than smart, with features that are not user friendly, and don't work as expected, it does not give you control of your laptop, it's like a placebo of a command center.

2.- Alienware macro buttons on my alienware are useless, alienware keyboard doesnt have next song buttons which I've had in all other laptops, and it is not a surprise you can't link macro keyboard buttons to a simple function as change song or stop song. It's the stupidest software ever, and its badly made, most likely because it was made in the UK, and by a very poor design team.

3.- Bad power/energy/performance/thermal settings. Laptop overheats and performance goes deep down bottom. I was forced to install throttle stop software, removing turbo setting from processor to avoid overheating on the laptop when using video card, performance did not change at all, but heating reduced, that tells you how poorly this laptop's been designed and optimized.

Price/benefit wise: 2/5 stars. 

Never buying an alienware again. You make a joke of a premium product, with a fake "support", ending up with the lowest quality design not only in software optimization but also hardware integration. And lets not forget about the science fair, prototype-level software you designed, so-called Alienware Command Centre. 

If they released the access to temp and performance control to users, this would be a nice laptop though, as software made by users/third parties.

I hope Dell gets rid of Alienware. 

Bye.

Id just get a cooling pad and let the laptop turbo up and downthrottle when it needs to. Why would it stay at 4.5Ghz all the time? It’s bad for battery and you don’t need to turn off turbo anyways! It’s called ThrottleStop  for a reason you know, it’s stops the laptops CPU from throttling even if it’s thermals are too high.

 

I get a cooling pad like I said above and I’d get some server grade thermal paste off of Amazon with some thermal pads to conduct heat better.