WHEN IS WDFME.exe GOING TO GET FIXED?????

[Momus]

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.

[Fritz]

Everyone seems to be missing the point.

None of us should have to go in and shut down a program or terminate a service.

It should just work................................................................................................................................................................................

[PAT_WD]

The same problem is there with me as well... this WDFME.exe IS A MONSTER and does not want to stop running... taking at least 99% of the CPU...

[Stephenf2020]

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.

[Stephenf2020]

Here we go again - NO virtual machine running all day. 

[Highflyer]

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.

My fingers are crossed. Please offer a solution.

Thanks

[Keithgrin]

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.

[manateeka]

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.

[gazmomurphy]

Thanks that worked

[JKosin]

I'm going to have to try cleaning everything again and re-installing all the software....

WDFME keeps using ~50% of my CPU and gobbles memory.