I recently installed a 1TB My Book Essential to my Dell XPS 420 Windows 7 configured computer that I have running all of my home media and my home office. Since installing, my computer is acting very strange and has slowed down considerably. It is to the point that I remove the WD drive and only back up once a week by manually reinstalling. Has anyone else experienced similar problems and if so, how did they deal with it?
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I installed same unit yesterday on my HP with same problem. Computer is very slow now. Sorry, don’t have a solution. Hoping someone out there will see these posts and offer advice.
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Hi,
This can be caused by Windows attempting to validate the Software’s Certificate of Authenticity, and the Network is running through a Proxy Server, which in turn could be filtering the request.
WD doesn’t provide support for configuring Proxy Server settings. So, you will need to either have your network administrator configure the Proxy Server to allow SmartWare to authenticate, or you will need to bypass the Proxy Server until SmartWare is authenticated on that computer. Then you should no longer have the issue of SmartWare causing your computer to slow down.
Or you could try updating the WD Smartware to the latest version.:
Unfortunately, your answer doesn’t solve my problem because I am not on a proxy server … just backing up my Dell XPS 420.
Windows 7 has a far superior backup system. It does system imaging, rescue Cd’s and version backups. There is no reason at all to use any “smart” software. 
Thank you … do you recommend deleting the WD Smartware and just using the Windows 7 backup? If so, do I also remove the backup files I have already put on the My Book Essential?
