Hi fatpossum; You describe typical behaviour of Dell's Autoupdate program. It is not a virus, it is legitimate. And a legitimate nuisance. It thinks its function (to keep Dell drivers and software updated) is so important that it must insert itself in your startup list. Your friend's security was right to flag it, and he made no error in blocking it. It will probably try to bother him again. Dell Update is a usefull program to check that your drivers, BIOS etc are current. It should be available to run a check on demand, but really has no need to load at startup or to run in real-time. If it bothers him enough, he can uninstall it from "Programs and Features" in Control Panel. There are about a dozen Dell programs listed, and I'm not sure exactly which one to uninstall. Likely candidates are "Dell SupportAssist Remediation" and/or "SupportAssist" and/or "SupportAssistAgent". Interestingly, on my Dell laptop with Win 10, Autoupdate does load at startup, yet is not listed in my WinPatrol Plus list of startup programs.
Forgive me for not being any more specific, but I am posting this for someone who drives for a living and doesn't have time to post it themselves..aside from the fact they are not real computer-term literate..Last night they had a square white box in the lower right corner pop up and say: "Dell update", and offered 2 choices.... Allow or Remind me later.They did "Allow", thinking it was legit...then their antivirus popped up with a message saying (more or less):"something is trying to install itself that will turn on every time you sign on..."So, they told their antivirus to block it...Was this pop up posing as a Dell Update legit....or some type of virus?They are using a desktop....and WiFi...
Virus posing as Dell Update?