I use a Western Digital external hard-drive, it comes with quite a bit of software some of which isn’t optional to install, it also adds few background processes and I discovered that a known problem is that they can slow your PC down to a grinding halt as that was regularly happening to mine.
An online check said that you should open Task Manager and manually shut-down these processes, which I have been doing and which worked fine.
However after the latest Windows 10 update this doesn’t work anymore, there is one process, ‘WD Business Rule Engine’, which keeps reappearing after I right-click and shut it down.
Very annoying, is there anything I can do to stop it doing that?
You could probably amend the security properties of the process so nobody has any rights to run it, but that might cause problems in its own right.
Does it really not function as a standalone external hard drive on generic drivers? What happens if you plug it into someone else’s computer where the WD software has never been installed?
I don’t know, I’ll give that a try when I get a chance, I’m not really a technology person, I just plugged it in and it seemed to add all these background processes by itself. It was no big deal shutting them down manually but with the Windows 10 update that particularly task just won’t stay closed!
(Assuming you really and truly want to kill this and know it’s not going to hurt anything else…)
Go to Run (Windows + R) and type Services.msc
Find the program in the list.
Kill the service, but also double click on it and change all the settings you can find to make sure it can’t restart on it’s own. You’ll find that it’s probably set so that if it fails or crashes it automatically restarts. Also, you can run msconfig and make sure the program isn’t set to run on startup, but IIRC, you can make sure that does/doesn’t happen from this screen anyways.
This isn’t fool proof, I’ve had programs that will still continue to restart on their own, usually because services.msc isn’t what’s controlling them, but rather some other program isn’t monitoring them. In that case, it’s a matter of scouring the internet looking for a way to kill them, which can be anything from something as simple as changing the name of the file, to changing a registry key from 0 to 1 or uninstalling something. And in some cases it can’t be done.
You need to turn off autoplay. If the software were really necessary to use the drive, it couldn’t have installed from the drive, and would have had to be supplied on CD or DVD. Then uninstall the WD software.
Probably true, although they can be sneaky and only give access to a small partition containing the installer, which then provides access to the main partition - I’ve only ever seen encrypted devices actually do this though.
Services set to manual can be started, but don’t start automatically when windows starts. Services set to disabled cannot start.
Some manual services can be started b other (automatic start) services, so disable anything you are sure you don’t want. just be sure to look at the details (i.e. program path) and don’ disable anything that’s essential to and part of Windows.
I’ve worked with quite a few WD external drives over the last 11 years. My SOP has always been to immediately repartition and reformat either in Mac format or more often FAT 32 to use in a mixed environment. (They usually come reformatted NTFS) I’ve never needed or even wanted to use their crummy software. Windows and OS X both have ways of encrypting drives if necessary.
Go to the control panel, find scheduled tasks, se if there is one there that you can remove.
You can also go to “Uninstall or Change a program”, and uninstall all the WD stuff.
This thing does automatic cloud backup. FWIW, my guess would be that it’s clashing with your Anti-Virus system. WD is touching files to thicnk about or do backups, and your AV is probably re-scanning everything that the WD program touches.
I’d be curious to know if I should do the same thing myself. I just got a WD external drive, to use for system image and data back-ups. Should I do this, too? What’s the value in repartitioning and reformatting for someone doing what I want to do? (And what back-up software works best in this kind of situation?)
