It was a huge waste of my time, but I got through the registry deleting anything to do with SmartWare and did searches for, and deleted, anything Western Digital which wasn’t simpy a system USB device reference. That and a bunch of leftover file hunting after a deep RevoUninstaller uninstall and it finally seems my system is cleaned of that mess, and my Asus 901 running Windows 7 is ticking along happy as a clam, just like it was before that bloated WD nonsense made it like wading through deep mud.
The worst part was finding a way to delete the now-disabled services. No, actually the worst part was getting ownership of each and every layer of folders in the bogus, incomplete backup on the drive after uninstalling the SmartWare program. That took ages. But getting rid of those ghost services - WDDMService, WDFMEService, and WDRulesService - out of my services listing was hard. That’s because most sites list bogus syntax. I kept getting errors about syntax or service not being found. Finally found this page:
And the guy spelled it out right. So what you need, or at least what I needed, is to follow these steps:
open a command prompt window (Start Menu > type the word command) and right-click on it and select ‘run as administrator’
it’ll start in a User directory, so you need to get root - type cr… then hit Enter, then cr… again and Enter again, and you should have just C:/ drive or whatever
type sc delete “WDDMService” and hit Enter. That’s it. Do the same for the other two and in mere seconds you’ll be free of these services.Worked a charm, where brackets or putting on a .exe suffix or whatever just didn’t.
I wish WD would stick to making better and better portable drives. I actually liked my last, rather boxy Elements drive a lot until I clumsily dropped and destroyed it. That’s why I got this slicker-looking model. Just shouldn’t have naively installed the nice-sounding SmartWare. Such a bad idea.
update [Deleted] won’t install have been trying for two weeks was on the phone with wdc support and still will not [Deleted] UPDATE !!! what [Deleted] software!!!
I’m still having high CPU and memory usage from WDFME.exe. Shortly after boot, it runs up to about 48% CPU and 900Mb RAM. Sometimes it will drop a bit after the backup is complete, but not much.
Memory usage is better than before this update – 380 MB while running SmartWare, 195 MB after closing SmartWare. It’s still keeping memory usage up around 72% (including other running processes), which is down from 92% before the update. Still seems high.
everybody seems to be complaining about high CPU and/or RAM usage with 1.5.1.6 but I have not noticed this as a problem as yet. Does anybody have my problem??? In Category Backup The content gauges To Be Backed UP and Backed Up seem to go haywire over a period of time. Sometimes they show “Backup completed successfully” with what I think is the correct number of files and GB showing in both columns. At other times it shows Backup completed successfully with an obviously wrong number of files and GB in both columns. And at other times they show “Partial backup completed” with disparate numbers of files showing in both columns.
If the purpose of Smartware is to give reassurance that all your files are backed up in the event of a disc crash then this behaviour signally fails to do this.
I would be very interested if anyone else notices this with 1.5.1.6 as, irrespective of the resource usage, this hits at the heart of what Smartware is supposed to do and I think is a fatal flaw.
we bought our WD external HDDs against the day when our internal HDD went defunct. It is plainly beyond the ordinary user to practice data retrieval we just hope that the WD HDD and Smartware will work as advertised and that we will be able to reload any new HDD installed after a catastrophic failure.
Given that the content gauges are our only indication that everything is working ok and our files are being backed up then why is everybody not complaining about their failure to properly indicate the current backup state. Earlier versions of Smartware did not show this problem in my modest system. With 1.5.1.6 I have no idea what is happening. What would happen if my internal HDD crashed and the content gauges showed only a “partial backup” or a “full backup” with only a quarter of my files backed up. Would my system be protected? I really don’t know and that is my problem.
WD need to fix this or at least tell me what would happen in the above situation. Otherwise the kit does not do what it said on the box.
They write that smartware is also available in 7 new languages, but I can not find the languages…
release notes:
WD SmartWare update highlights:
Windows release 1.5.1.6 (updated 8/16/2011)
Fixed inaccurate information displayed when destination drive is full.
Fixed high memory utilization on certain systems.
Backup only the files and folders that you want. Users now have the flexibility to backup either by selecting pre-defined file categories or selecting individual files and folders.
Available in 7 new languages: Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, and Turkish.
If you don’t need backup function (just want usb storage), you don’t need SmartWare
you can uninstall SmartWare and just install mybook driver (look for SESdriver on download page) OR use SmartWare installer (on mybook smartware autostart) you should see option to install driver+utility (drive password) without backup
If you insist using SmartWare, please try :
uninstalling previous version of SmartWare before installing new version
excluding WDFME.exe and other SmartWare software on your AntiVirus/Security software, because WDFME running in background there is possibility conflicting with your Security software
[this not related but no wrong to try] for Windows vista/7 user, in power setting, try disable “USB selective suspend”
※ some people might already tried this and still getting the issue, this not guarantee will fix your issue but for people haven’t, please try and hopefully it fix your issue
Just wanted to report my experiences with 1.5.1.6. After initially installing an older version that came on the installation CD with my MBL 3TB, I uninstalled SmartWare, downloaded 1.5.1.6 and installed it. I got no confirmation that it was installed, but once the installation prompt disappeared, I found it in my program menus as well as in the WD Quick View. As soon as I started SmartWare, it immediately began categorizing my files.
Since I wanted to use the new File Backup mode instead of the category mode, I switched to File Backup mode, selected the directories I wanted to backup, and started the backup. The backup proceeded for several hours and had only completed about 25GB out of over 100GB selected when I was ready to shut it down for the evening (I don’t leave my computers running at night).
So I stopped the backup from the SmartWare UI, and shut down the PC. Today when I started up, WDFME.exe started running soon after startup, and at some point took over my PC completely. I could not even get the Task manager to load and my Firefox browser would not respond at all.
Eventually, WDFME gave up enough resources for the Task manager to start, and at that time, WDFME was using 30-50% of the CPU. The WDRulesEngine was also consuming significant amounts of CPU. After a few minutes, both processes appear to have settled down in the background, but I have not re-started the SmartWare backup yet.
I’m not sure if these processes were still trying to categorize my files, but I would hope that once I switched to File Backup mode, that activity would cease. But maybe not. Apparently, setting my SmartWare preferences to only run backups when the system is “idle” has no effect on WDFME’s priority. I will try to complete the File Backup and see how things behave once the initial backup is complete.
Why isnt it possible just to EXIT smartware when the 100%CPU issue rears its ugly head again if clearly WD isn’t capable of fixing this horrible software. I have the process eating all my CPU again for days on a row now. I know I can uninstall but I do want to use some features of the software at certain times. SO PLEASE DO SOMETHING WD. Is there still active development?
For the most part, no. However, that’s only because the CPU issue is already being worked on. If the moderators see an issue that looks uniquely different then they will escalate it. Otherwise, the community is a user to user community as intended. Occasionally, staff members do review the forum posts to follow an issue, but they don’t always respond. When we’re quiet like this, it’s only because there isn’t anything to report. On top of all that, testing is going on, and updates should be available in a while. Unfortunately, I don’t have a timeline for the next release.
I have a serious bug with this release. It ate my C drive before I could figure out the problem. While categorizing files the software appears to create sqlite temp files that grow and grow and grow. I had more than 60 GB of these files before I discovered the problem.
It is easy. Go to your windows temp file and look for etilqs files (SQLite Backwards). If you have Smartware running and categorizing files you can watch these files grow by refreshing. I stopped Smartware for 24 hours and deleted all the existing etilqs files. No new ones appeared. I just reconnected my passport and started Smartware and in less than 30 minutes I have 10 files totaling more than one gig. At this rate it will not take long to eat my SSD again.
I hope this helps some folks and I will be happy to share my experience with anyone from WD.
Wow, so you know about the problem. I bet you can imagine the hours it took me to restore my system after having the C drive eaten by what is clearly a bug. Why would Smartware leave these files? Why should I have to clean temp files once a week to keep my system running?
Amazing.
Hey everybody, as your C drive is being eaten make sure you run CCleaner once a a week. I just can’t believe it.
There are several of us who have mentioned this before, and there are several threads in this forum that mention this bug (and other problems). Its absolutely amazing to me that a company like WDT would release software with such major flaws. Not deleting one’s own temp files, is “programming 101” kind of nonsense. It’s been several months since anyone at WDT claimed they were “working on a solution” for the temp files. Silence from them on the other problems (high CPU usage, inaccurate “progress gauges”, never ending “categorizing” of files).
