After two days of abyssmal performance with my new 1TB WD Passport drive I decided to uninstall SmartWare. Easier said than done it seems. Getting rid of the WDDM and WDFME services has so far proved impossible, though at least I was ‘allowed’ to disable them. The hardest thing to get rid of, surprisingly, was my backup folders on the drive. I thought it would be a simple matter of deleting, but no, thanks to permissions being preserved beautifully on these files and folders I had to spend over an hour going through all the layers of nested folders left behind after an initial delete attempt and grant myself ownership before being allowed to delete them. What a waste of time.
Anyway, I’m putting my two cents in here, somewhat at random, simply because I would like to vent a little on WD’s behavior in this, and at the same time realise that such a complaint is a bit like yelling at the great wall of China. Nothing’s going to change.
WD; the incredible bloatware that is SmartWare ought to be a user option, not something thrust upon us without at least a dire warning. I’m using Windows 7 Ultimate on an Asus 901 netbook, and normally it performs perfectly. Characters appear as I type them, not later. Pages and folders and files load without waiting, the computer normally just works well. With SmartWare (unbelievably ironic name, by the way, kudos for your sense of humour with that) running on the 901 I was transported back to a decade ago, using Win98SE on a piece of junk notebook from Acer. No, that’s an exaggeration; that Acer notbook and Win98SE ran much faster than what I’ve been looking at the past couple of days, every time I connect my new WD drive. Why is that? Megalomania is a term used online quite a bit when people discuss WD’s software, and I’ll have to concur. Can’t see any other explanation. The software made my computer unusable. Brilliant.
And I see from various sources that part of it is permanently part of the drive. Again, brilliant. Looks like I’ll be grabbing myself either an older model WD or some other brand of 1TB drive soon, just in case this drive decides to take away my access to data. I note that WD automagically toggled Autoplay on, something I’ve not run in many, many years. And I see from the forums here that with Autoplay turned off, I might some day lose access to my data. Again, brilliant.
So thanks for the quick re-education on corporate BS. This purchase was a mistake. I like the hardware, but the software being forced down my throat is not acceptable behavior on WD’s part.
