HOWTO: Minimising SmartWare installation (= reducing resource footprint)

Since the SmartWare software contains a lot of junky stuff that I definitely find of no use, I’ve made few tests and removed few unnecessary things from the default installation. This is a short summary that will perhaps be helpfull to you:

Which functions of SmartWare I want?

  • Free space LED/eInk indicator - all those fancy blinkenlichten in the “Elite” series of Passport and MyBook , roarr
  • Fast way to unlock the encrypted drive

Which functions I don’t care about?

  • Backup - I use commandline ‘unison’ tool for differential folder syncing (run by tasksched or batches)
  • Blinky tray icon - got plenty of those already

What to do then?

There are several apps that are starting up with the system, and some of them are totally uncecessary.

Services: Start > Run > Services.msc

  • “WD File Management Engine” - disable - don’t know what it does, but ain’t missing it anyways
  • “WD File Management Shadow Engine” - disable - same as above
  • “WDDMService” - keep enabled - it makes the blinkenlichten work correctly

Startup folder: Start Menu > Programs > Startup

  • “WDDMStatus.lnk” - remove - it launches the tray icon which is a WDDMService frontend, and nothing more

How to unlock the encrypted device without tray icon?

First, you need a script. Here are few lines of VBS code. It jumps from drive to drive to find your VCD and launch “unlock.exe”:

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")For driveLetter = 68 to 90    If ( fso.FileExists( Chr(driveLetter)+":\Unlock.exe" ) ) Then        shell.Run Chr(driveLetter)+":\Unlock.exe", 1, true        Exit For    End IfNext

Save it as “whateveryouwish.vbs” in a folder you’ll remember and then bind it to some keyboard shortcut (I use Win+O). Works 100x faster than “click tray icon, then click…”, basically in an instant :slight_smile:

To bind the script to the keyboard you can either app like HotKeyz or some keyboard-specific app (like Logitech Setpoint, now that’s a piece of software WDC should learn from!!!)

Now everything works smoothly (and fast) and WD SmartWare tops at 4MB RAM usage :smiley:

Hope you’ll find it useful :smiley:

msacharewicz wrote:

Since the SmartWare software contains a lot of junky staff that I definitely find of no use

Yeah the staff is pretty junky - especially that Bill guy… but the SmartWare stuff seems pretty good to me :slight_smile:

Yeah, ROTFL, that was an amazing typo :slight_smile:

But the staff is junky indeed… I’ve made once some fuss over this board about some failed SmartWare update (not working over non-US-localised systems) and cited the mail I’ve recieved from WDC support along with all contents including the name of the girl who wrote it, and… it’s hard to imagine my suprise when a day later I’ve recieved an unexpected call from Germany from that girl angry and mad about citing her :smiley: It’s definitely not sth you would expect from a mature company :smiley: