Hi,
I am new to this community and new to installing/using an external drive. I hope somebody can help me. After reading through the manual for my passport ultra I’m very confused. Do I have to install, etc. all the items that are listed in the manual? I just want to use my passport ultra as an external drive and copy my movies and albums, etc on it, so I can delete them from my internal computer drive and have more free space on it and access the external drive just like an internal drive to watch the movies etc. If this question was already answered previously I’m very sorry for repeating it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so if you just want to point me toward the answer that would be ok with me also. I have a Windows Vista Home Premium, 64-bit Operating System. Thanks for your suggestions!
For simple usage, you just need to plug it in, no need to install anything.
There are various elements to the software package that WD provide with the drive:
SES driver - this is for the more “advanced” parts of the drive usage, such as enabling security (password locking) and general drive encryption. If you have suitable admin rights on the machine to do so, there is normally no real issue to install this and indeed Windows will probably try to do it automatically when you first plug the drive in.
Quickview - this is a convenience icon in the system tray of Windows, which you can put your mouse over to see details of the drive (health, percentage full, safe removal etc) plus quick access to Smartware if it is installed.
Smartware - this is WD’s back-up software, which is supplied with the drive. It’s entirely optional, some people use it, some don’t. It’s ok for the job, but certainly has limitations and glitches as you can see from a quick look in the software forum here.
Even if you don’t install any kind of software, when you plug the drive in you should see it come up as a new drive letter on your Windows Explorer (similar to a flash drive) and at the basic level you can just use it llike one. But the key word of advice is to always safely remove the drive (either via Quickview or the normal “Safely remove hardware and eject media” icon under Windows) rather than just disconnecting it, as just pulling the cable can lead to drive corruption and data loss.
Thanks DarrenHill,
I kind of thought that’s how it would work originally, but after reading the manual …
And thanks for reminding on using the ‘eject media’ icon! I had read already some of the threads where people didn’t go that way and messed their device up!
