Latest Dell SupportAssist seems to cause BSODs on Alienware M16 R2

Same here on an Alienware M16 R2 — exact same issue.

I’ve been dealing with the same random BSODs (“Critical Process Died – 0xEF”) during the last days, and after checking the minidumps with WinDbg I got the same culprit you found:

0xEF_DellSupportAss_BUGCHECK_CRITICAL_PROCESS

In my case the crashes happened every 20–60 minutes, completely at random. Hardware diagnostics were clean, SSD and RAM healthy, BIOS fine… nothing pointed to a hardware failure.

Just like you, the moment I uninstalled:

• Dell SupportAssist

• SupportAssist Remediation

• OS Recovery Plugin

…the system became 100% stable again.

So yes, it definitely looks like the latest SupportAssist update is causing these crashes on the M16 R2. Hopefully Dell takes a look at this because it’s affecting more users than it seems.

Thanks for posting your findings — it helped confirm mine.

Thanks for sharing this. Uninstalling Dell SupportAssist and related plugins seems to resolve recent Alienware M16 R2 BSOD “Critical Process Died 0xEF” crashes for several users.

I was seeing the same thing on my Dell 16 Premium

Adding another data point and a possibly distinct twist worth flagging for Dell Engineering.

Platform: Alienware 16 Area-51 (AA16250), Intel Core Ultra 200HX, NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, BIOS 2.2.0 (4/7/2026), Windows 11. Not in the documented impact list yet — XPS 15 9530, Precision 3571, Dell Pro Plus 14/16, and Pro Max Tower T2 are mentioned in the threads above; adding Alienware AA16250 with a discrete GPU configuration.

Same root cause, same fix: Dell/Alienware SupportAssist Remediation v5.5.16.0 installed via MSI at 5/12 2:11:51 PM. Disabling the "Alienware SupportAssist Remediation" service eliminates the BSOD pattern; full uninstall confirms. 22+ bugchecks over 22 hours, every one on a precise 37.4-minute interval (Quartz.NET scheduler signature — Quartz.dll is in the agent folder, which lines up with the scheduled-job theory).

Twist that might matter for Engineering: alongside the 0xEF CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED on DellSupportAss, this machine fires continuous WHEA-Logger ID 17 PCIe AER corrected errors on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 dGPU (PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_2C58). They fire heavily during the crash storm (~230/hour) and persist at lower volume (5-12/hour) until SARemediation is disabled — at which point WHEA goes to zero. That tells me the dGPU PCIe link has a latent marginal condition, AND SARemediation's scheduled probe is what's both surfacing it as WHEA AER traffic and escalating it into the fatal process kill. On laptops with discrete graphics this could be a more specific failure path than the iGPU-only systems in the threads above — worth checking whether one of the scheduled jobs issues PCIe-touching diagnostic operations (NVML query, GPU thermal poll, link state query).

Confirming the official workaround works on Alienware/RTX 5090 setups too: stop and disable Alienware SupportAssist Remediation, OR fully uninstall v5.5.16.0 via Settings → Apps → Installed apps. The full DSA app and DellTechHub can stay; it's specifically the Remediation service component that needs to come off. The companion Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery Plugin for Dell Update 5.5.16.0 is along for the ride and can also be removed since it has nothing to plug into without Remediation installed.

For anyone wondering about prior stable version: per the Dell download page the previous version is 5.5.15.2 (released 4/29/2026). Hopefully Dell publishes a 5.5.17.x fix soon; SupportAssist will auto-install whichever stable version Dell ships and ProtectAssist scan/repair points will resume from there.

— Grant

I also had this BSOD with stop code CriticalProcessDied following a Dell update two days ago.. Todays update to the Dell SupportAssist tool has resolved the issue for me, so far at least. I have been running all day without issue, yesterday the OS crashed every two hours at a minimum. I didn't uninstall anything.   

I uninstalled the remediation service and my Dell 16 Premium stopped giving the BSOD afterward