SupportAssist Update Fails

The solution was to manually download the drivers from the Dell Support site If anyone else has this issue, please visit the site and enter your Service Tag/model to manually download the latest drivers for your system.

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@John harper wrote:

The solution was to manually download the drivers from the Dell Support site If anyone else has this issue, please visit the site and enter your Service Tag/model to manually download the latest drivers for your system.

 

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Manually downloading drivers from the Dell Support site is a solution to a separate problem of collecting drivers from Dell. It is not a solution to SupportAssist failing to update itself. Manually downloading drivers has nothing to do with the defect in SupportAssist.

I'm having the same issue...just got an Optiplex 3000 Micro i5 and it came with SupportAssist 10.3. Whenever I start support assist, it asks me if I want to update. I get this screen.

Then I get a system message that I need to restart, then I (almost immediately get this screen). 

I've tried to update this no less than 10 times, each time with the same result. 

The support agent I spoke with suggested I Reset the computer, i.e., completely dump all the data that I migrated from the computer that this replaced, and dump and reinstall all of the applications. And he said he couldn't guarantee that would fix the problem. SMH!

Is there an alternative solution? Does using "Dell Command | Update" generate the same results? I am having no issue with that program. 

Thanks in advance!

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@rsleonard wrote:

Is there an alternative solution? Does using "Dell Command | Update" generate the same results? I am having no issue with that program. 

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Also, be careful of posts by @lmacri regarding BIOS versions and .NET Runtime versions. Those things have nothing to do with this defect in SupportAssist and will waste a lot of debugging time.

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@rsleonard wrote:

I'm having the same issue...just got an Optiplex 3000 Micro i5 and it came with SupportAssist 10.3. Whenever I start support assist, it asks me if I want to update. I get this screen.

I am unable to view the screenshots that were posted. They just render as yellow triangles. Maybe the programmers of the Dell Community site are the same who maintain SupportAssist.

In my case, I found that when I used the Microsoft Windows Control Panel -> Programs and Features, to uninstall SupportAssist it would provide a dialog that listed an .msi file it could not find. The path was under a Temp folder. Presumably SupportAssist uninstallation has a dependency on a resource that was stored in a Temp folder and then removed (maybe by SupportAssist's temp file cleanup function). I ended up using Google to locate someone hosting the old SupportAssist .msi. I downloaded that, put in the location, and then was able to perform an uninstall. Note that old versions of SupportAssist do not appear to be available from Dell even with URL hacks. Downloading old installers from random locations is a bad practice. The installer was signed by Dell, which provides some assurance, but the ideal solution would be for Dell to fix SupportAssist rather than for users to go with the workaround I used.

Is there an alternative solution? Does using "Dell Command | Update" generate the same results? I am having no issue with that program.

I believe "Dell Command | Update" is designed for enterprise use and "Dell Update" for consumers, but I am not sure of what Dell intended by providing multiple programs for the same purpose. The Update programs seem to be limited to just checking for updates while SupportAssist adds useless functions and some advertising. Once I finally got rid of SupportAssist I vowed to blacklist it. I still want to keep the system up to date, so now I am trying "Dell Update." "Dell Update" has obvious defects that are clear on first run. The "Last Check" field fails to repopulate after running a check and hitting OK. It populates correctly only after restarting "Dell Update." Therefore, I have no confidence that "Dell Update" provides other than mediocre quality either.