I bought a 2TB My Book thinking that I would be able to access it with Smartware “Pro” as easily as I can with any other peripheral (eg. CD drives, my smartphone, my flash drives, my cameras…) and basic application software (eg. my photo viewers)
I was in systems for 40 years and this is a pretty fundamental capability that was obviously solved a long time ago by the manufacturers of CD drives, smartphones, flash drives. etc…
I just wanted the drive for systems backups from all the PC’s on my home network.
Ha!
Smartware “Pro” will neither access nor even recognize the WD My Book drive when the drive is plugged into the USB port on my network’s router. I can map a drive to it with my ancient Windows XP but Smartware won’t recognize it. Smartware won’t even recognize the WD drive as a Windows Share, forget about mapping a drive.
My Windows Explorer recognizes it and I can move files back and forth and share them with others on my home network.
But for automated backups???
My Kaspersky Anti-Virus software comes with automated backup software that recognizes the WD drive and works just fine and there’s probably lots of other automated backup software out there that would work just fine with the WD drive.
The manufacturer of the drive however can’t seem to get it straight and from my reviews it appears that this problem has existed for YEARS!
Now! Smartware loads automatically at startup and there’s no way to keep it from consuming resources unnecessarily than by manually turning off the Windows Services and Processes for it, a nuisance.
Even if you flag it to only start manually at boot time, it still starts.
There must be something in the Registry that overrides my flagging.
I’m not about to go looking through my Registry however and changing flags and possibly causing problems.
So, once I make sure I’m not shooting myself in the foot, I will uninstall Smartware.
I have to make sure I can still access the drive even if Smartware isn’t there and doing who knows what and that there isn’t something on the drive that expects Smartware to be there.
“Smartware Pro”???
Ha.
“Dumbware Amateur”