Hi there - I haven’t done this before so I hope it drops into the conversation where I expect it to.
I have had trouble for a long time with dead slow performance by my Lpatop, and found these posts by luck.
When I looked in Task Manager to see what process was tying up my CPU WDWDFME wasn’t visible, but in the Task Manager, there is a ‘Performance’ tab. If you go into that you will see a button near the bottom that says ‘Resource Monitor’.
If you click on that you can see what is chewing up the CPU - if you click on the CPU column it will sort in order of what is using the most. That let me see that it was WDFME.exe chewing up 70% to 95% of my CPU even though the back up drive isn’t plugged in.
What you then do is right click on it, and end the process. It aiin’t backing up; just stuffing up. Immediately I got control of my computer back and CPU use is bubbling along at 2% and things are humming. I agree with all the posts. What a stupid program to completely neuter your machine when not even needed.
Time to search for another Back up program. I like the drives though and have several doing rotating copies of my 90GB of music and 80GB of photos.
Thanks to all the posts that helped me know what I was looking for.
Tonight I came home and for about the sixth time in two months my machine was slow. I looked at memory usage and of the 12 gig I have installed, WDFME was using 10.2 gig. What’s up with that!? Will try uninstalling and reinstalling and if that doesn’t fix it, buh bye WD. I’ll find a better performing backup hardware and software product.
I have the "My Book Essential USB 3.0 and am trying to use it with my Windows 7 system. I have had the external drive for several months but never tried to use it because the manual makes it difficult to dig through how to set this up and make it work. Last night I decided to give it a try once more and I saw there was a system update for the program. So I installed the update. This morning my computer began acting very strange. It was extremely slow booting up and loading any program. I check the ctl,alt,del to get the management panel and found WDFME.exe was using 96% of the memory. I then checked Bing for WDFME.exe and found a lot on the internet. Many folks having this same memory problem for quite some time. Several said they had contacted Western Digital and got tech service who fixed their problem. I tried that and the woman I talked to said there was no solution at this time but they were working on it. I asked how I would know when there was a solution and she said just keep checking the forums. I have deleted the WDSmartware from my computer and would appreciate hearing from WD if there is any hope that the unit I purchased might work without ruining my computer.
For several hours my pc was going REALLY slow. If I brought up more than one program, the screens would blank out. Reboots took forever. I noticed that almost all 6gb of ram were being used. I looked into resources off of the task list and found one file taking 5.9gb of the ram. Its called wdfme.exe. Its from Western Digitals Smartware backup program. I found a bunch of people on the net with the same problem. I tried to uninstall the program and it kept hanging about files I couldn’t find. I went into the registry and deleted all executions of wdfme.exe and smartware. Now my pc is back to normal. I had never asked WD to backup my pc, I NEVER use other than ztree for that. WD never asked for any configuration of their backup program. Another “feature” from programmers trying to control us without asking.
This happened to me today for (i think) the first time. I saw it was WDFME and googled it and came here and it calmed down. Maybe it got scared! LOL
I may uninstall the program, but will I still be able to access my drive contents or will I need to redo my backups? I don’t use it for incremental backup. I only plug it in when I want to back up my files, and I do both category backup and drag/drop of directories.
I am thinking that the drag/drop files will still be accessible, but not the categories?
If anyone has done this before and knows the answer to this, I’d appreciate it hearing your descripiton of the differences and how it’s working for you.
Unless this gets fixed pretty quick, I will not buy another WD drive.
Something you might try is to change the WDFME.EXE service to a manual start using manage - services after right-clicking Computer from the start menu. This will start WDFME when starting WD Smartware.
Three points to note:
WD Smartware is slow to start-up
Your processor consumption will go up dramatically during your use of WD Smartware
You may need to manually stop the WDFME.EXE service after you finish with WD Smartware
Making this change has dramatically reduced my processor consumption and allowed me to get on with day-to-day activities.
This same problem started happening to me about two weeks ago(shortly after WD Passport Firmware update). Isolated the problem like many others on this string. Task Manager-Processes-Show Processes from all users. I found that WDFME.EXE was using over 70,000,000 kb of RAM and my performance monitor showed physical memory usage of 98%. I did End Process on WDFME.exe and instantly switched back to real time performance monitor graph. I saw usage drop from 98% to normal 20% within seconds. I then called WD tech support. They told me WDFME.exe constantly runs in the background scanning all files for changes for automatic updating. He said that if I didn’t want to use WDsmartware and do automatic updates that I should just uninstall and use Windows backup manually when I want to. I told him I thought that was really poor tech support and customer support and that they need to figure this out and fix it. He didn’t really ask me the right questions, so I started TELLING him. OK, I’ve had this passport installed since 10/2011 and it has worked fine until about 2 weeks ago. If I restart my computer, it’s fine and only uses 20% of memory. After about an hour of usage OR idle, it’s up to 98%. Only started happening AFTER WD Passport firmware update. He then says “OH, well now that you said that, you don’t have the WD Smartware Software Update that goes with that firmware update. That’s the problem.” I was thinking, you ■■■■■! Why didn’t you just ask that earlier? Pi$$poor tech support on that one… Anyway, that’s probably the common problem in this thread. He said before the software update, I needed to make sure that all these were current: Java 6, Update 31, Adobe/Adobe Player 11, Active X 11, Microsoft .net Framework 4.0 Client Profile, and Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 Extended. This is my thought. Somehow the firmware updates without the corresponding software update created some sort of “endless loop” where the old software was searching for something it couldn’t find or something like that. I hope this helps us all. I now need to go turn on a lot of automatic updates I disabled while tracking this problem down. Good Luck all.
OK, it’s me again. What they did NOT tell me from India was that you need to completely UNINSTALL WD Smartware using your control panel before doing the update. This is one of those “Updates” that does not update, but is a complete replacement for the existing version of Smartware. After three attempts to update and three days of testing, the problem still existed. I uninstalled all traces of Smartware and then ran the downloaded update installer package from WD and now successfully have Smartware Version 3.1.5.9 installed and working successfully on my Windows 7, SP1 computer with 8 GB RAM. By the way, WD is apparently aware of this issue, but trying to keep it quiet as I got a PRIVATE MESSAGE from Level 2 Tech Support as a result of this public post in this community. Funniest thing about that is that if I didn’t log back in here today to post a follow up to my post, i NEVER WOULD HAVE KNOWN. I was not sent an email or anything telling me level 2 tech was trying to get in touch with me. ha ha. Good Luck everyone.
I too have seen this issue with the WDFME.EXE file, I have disabled it in my windows services. So it seems like there are issues with this application.
Does anyone know what this application actually does?
I found out that WDFME.EXE is the background automatic file scanning device for the WD automatic file backup system. It constantly scans your entire hard drive in real time looking for file changes to automatically backup if you have it set that way. When I was having issues, it was using 98% of my 7.97 GB of RAM. Now that I completely uninstalled the WD SmartWare software from my computer, ran C Cleaner.exe registry cleaner, ONLY THEN did the WD Smartware update, everything works fine and my computer is only using 31% of available RAM. Level II tech contacted me by phone and I told him everything. I also told him about so many people posting in forums all across the net talking about this same issue. He explained that there is a disconnect in WD that the engineers who could explain the fixes are not able to post to forums and that the WD community on this website is ONLY for customers to post, NOT WD employees. Ha Ha. So THAT is why they never respond, they can’t! I told him how this is giving them a “black eye” and that they are going to lose a lot of sales if they don’t get out in front of this. He said he will mention all of this to his superiors. Since I had already fixed my own problem, they wanted me to take a snapshot of my system and send to them for engineer analysis so they could try to replicate the exact issue I was having. Each computer is like a snowflake, many are similar, but none are the same. Each person customizes them differently by settings and installed software. This makes it difficult for WD to apply one fix across the board, but they definitely should NEVER ALLOW the firmware update to be made to the Passport without first having the software updated. Also, the software should automatically detect a previous version of itself and uninstall then update all by itself.
I had the same problem. The fix was to delete the software that came with the passport and do a new update which is actually a new program. Just doing a update did not work. Had to delete first. Now when I start the computer it runs full out for 10 minutes or so using 100% of cpu but and then it quits. Before it would run for hours. Hope it conitues to work this way.
Can’t WD figure out a way to add a “stop” button to their WD Smartware. A “background program” does not need to use over 50% of system resources… at that rate, it’s definitely FOREGROUND no matter what you try to cal it.
Simply stopping the backup does not free-up any CPU or memory, what is needed is a way to stop the software from running when you don’t want it. Why not enable users to stop the software when they need to use their computer and then start the software when they want to resume real-time backup?
