My Passport and WD Smartware Problem

I’ve just  purchased a 2TB My Passport (Product # WDBY8L0020BSL-PESN) and I can’t get the combination to work properly with my wife’s Dell notebook.

The notebook is running XP SP3 (all current updates have been applied)

The Smartware Version is: 1.6.4

The Windows Disk Driver is: 5.1.2535.0 and is dated 1.7.01. A search doesn’t find a more recent driver. 

Problem Description

With no other apps running as soon as Smartware is started the PC goes into a very slow mode of operation, for example the mouse pointer movement is jerky and takes forever to move and may not move where expected. If I open the Windows Task manager evertything seems ok with no CPU or disk hogging going on.

From what I can see all of the Smartware functions do seem to work once you can get a function to respond.

If I close Smartware then I can view and transfer files to and from the drive from Windows Explorer so the hardware looks solid.

As a cross- check I have installed the same My Passport drive and the same version of Smartware on another PC (Win 7/64 though) and it runs just fine.

I’ve been messing around with this now for a few days and am getting fed up. I want to use this combination to make it easy for my wife. So far not so easy!

I hope someone can shed some light on this.

If the computer is slow I recommend you not to install smartware, in you case I would backup the files manually.