How to go around the "smartware" program

Is there anyway to shut off the “smartware program” on a My Book Essential so that on older operating systems, and on other PCs which require administrative rights in order to use hardware, you can simply access the files and unlock them on the hard drive??

I have tried unlocking both from Explorer and from the Command Prompt, but each time it says it has encountered an error.

Thank you

I have the 2TB  MY BOOK Essential and it installed the firmware with XP Home Edition SP3 without a problem.

I also still use Office 2000 so I have very old programs. Smartware automatically installed as well.

Smartware really slowed down my machine so I unplugged the external drive. What I find is that SmartWare  (ie WDSmartWare.exe) still takes from 10 to 32% of my CPU time, even when I ‘exited’ the program and removed the external drive (unplugged it).  It seems WDSmartware is still running something in the background. SmartWare can take up to 75% of my CPU time so that I can be waiting up to 20 minutes before I can use my PC.  When you disconnect everything, it still takes 8 minutes for all my other programs to load.  I am about to remove the WDSmartware program to see what happens the speed.

It may be that the only way you can get around Smartware is to remove it when you don’t need it.