WDFME.exe RAM hog

[Patfan1987]

Sry but I win for having the bigger problem lol. This is a big problem! This is without the drive plugged in, latest version, and I have 4gb of Physical memory. The computer becomes unusable!!

[wotasillybilly]

Agreed. You have a much bigger problem. Your grammar and sentence forming is terrible.

Sorry to be rude but if I get a telling off for this comment, at least I'll know someone from WD is actually reading this forum.

[Caper13]

Thank god for this post! I thought my computer needed to be reimaged and was transferring all software to new PC as I type. I had installed the WD "Smart" ware on the pc over a year ago but never did backups and havent actually had the external drive hooked up to that computer for over a year, yet the WD software was running continuously using between 50-90% of my CPU and huge amounts of memory.

Its obvious WD doesnt care about fixing this. Uninstalled the software. Computer works fine now.

Never buying another WD device again.

Thanks to everyone who posted and thanks for nothing WD.

[Patfan1987]

It’s all good. I was typing quickly to get the post out and wasn't thinking much about grammar. I couldn’t solve this issue so I made myself a work around. I uninstalled the WD smartware software and started using windows backup to backup to my WD 1TB drive. I had one issue with this and that was I needed to turn off my AV to finish the backup without getting an error code with windows backup. Maybe I will come back and use WD smartware software if they ever fix it.

Once I uninstalled the WD Smartware software the computer was back running great.

You cant do anything on your machine if you have the WD software installed.

Peace

[Shabs]

This seems to have brought down the CPU utilization mine was 36 percent just for this process now after disabling the VSS and restarting the WD engine it is almost zero.It spiked back to 50 percent after about 5 minutes but went down pretty soon. I will be monitoring this process for a few days.Also does disabling  the VSS process not cause any other problem.

[NotACompEng]

1. Is Bit Locker turned on?
2. Are you backing up encrypted files/folders?
3. Are you backing up compressed files/folders?
4. Can you also collect the list of VSS providers that are installed on the systems and provide? From an administrative command prompt type:  vssadmin list providers
5. Are your source partitions are Fat32, exFat, or external USB drives?'

As you can tell from my name, I'm neither a CompEng or Software writer:  I'm one of the 'standard customers' who wants their items to work right the first time.

1.  Dunno.  Don't care.  Shouldn't matter if you did it right the first time.

2. Yes  (in that I told it to back everything up).

3. Yes (see #2 comment).

4. Have no idea what this means.  I would guess that it is whatever the factory default is.

Running an HP with Vista64, Turion Dual Core XM Mobile RM-72 -> 4GB, use Chrome for my browser, have updated to the latest version of WD (the installer says so) and Microsoft NET (and that's about all I know about computers - these are regurgitated facts, I don't really know what they mean).

Any time I boot up, WD takes up to 88% of the memory at any given time.

Yes, I've uninstalled and reinstalled it:  that helped the problem for about 20 minutes.

How come it is acceptable for the computing community (pointing an irritated finger at lots of firms here) to release what seems to be alpha or beta ware as finished product and expect it to be acceptable?

[Lucky_Phil]

Shabs,

My understanding is that disabling the VSS will most likely mean you will lose your Windows restore points.

Particularly if you run defrag software like diskeeper.

With Diskeeper, you need to set the defrag options to VSS friendly in order to retain Windows restore points.

[Stephenf2020]

I am also having the memory issue.  I have a fairly new HP Pavilion quad core processor, 12 gig RAM, nothing encrypted, nothing compressed, I'm running Windows 7 Professional so bitlocker isn't an option.  The  WDFME.exe on about a half dozen occasions in the last three weeks will consume all my memory.  I'm running version 1.5.1.6   -  If I stop the WDFME service my used memory goes from 95% used down to 22%.   It's a pain in the neck when I'm not able to stop the service fast enough and it takes minutes to go from screen to screen.

fyi.  clicking  the SOFTWARE UPDATE button under HELP gives no indication of anything and doesn't appear to do anything.  Next time my memory usage is rocketing towards 96% used I'll take some screen shots. 

[junkyardwd]

I have tried and tried and am not wasting anymore time on WD products, hardware is fine software is just junk. how can WD get it so wrong. nothing in support pages for this fault, only in the community.

i have just unistalled WD software and am going to find something else , what a joke for a such a large company.

If WD are not going to help the customers than why would i or all my community buy.???

[rotarypower86]

I posted earlier in this thread (http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-Smartware/WDFME-exe-RAM-hog/m-p/350367#M4409). I ended up buying a Mac which doesn't need WDs software to backup. I guess this could be considered a fix.  An expensive fix. haha.