My long message just got wiped out. I’ll shorten. Dell support months ago told me, after nearly an hour on the phone, that I should reinstall Windows completely on my new Dell W11 laptop to solve the problem. I chose not to; because I had not done anything to upset the computer; Support Assist had not run when I got it and had only installed FireFox and MS Office.

Today I updated Windows freshly. No luck. I uninstalled SA, downloaded an installer from Dell, and got “Unable to download .Netframework/Core resource file.” My internet connection was fast and fine.

I uninstalled SA, checked community, uninstalled SA, and installed v. 609 of, supposedly, .Netframework; found links to two pages, one for  an MSI installer, one for some other initialled one (maybe MPB?).

I also checked to see if Windows services had something unchecked (and I’m way out of my league here). In the Control Panel at left, in Turn Windows features on or off, I checked the first box under .Netframework 3.5 and rebooted.

The first download appears fine; the second link produced a text and symbols page. But the first one, when run, brings up this message: “The upgrade patch cannot be installed by Windows service because the program to be upgraded may be missing or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program.” It tells me to verify both.

So now I’m really confused. The only runtimes in my control panel program list Desktop runtimes. There is nothing called .Netframework, though the new Desktop runtime is v609.

Again, this is a new computer. I don’t get it.

Can anyone help me, please? Is there more info I need to provide?