Western Digital Passport: Let's really annoy our customers

It's very tempting to go off into a massive rant about this, but I'll do my best to stay calm...

I've just bought an external hard drive to use as a backup for data files.
I decided to get a Western Digital Passport.
It looked like it would be ideal. At 640Gb, it has a reasonable capacity for our requirements and it simply plugs into a USB socket on the PC. As far as the PC is concerned, it just looks like another hard disc drive, so you can just transfer the files you want to back up across to it with Explorer.
So far so good.

I plugged it in, the PC did all the "looking for suitable driver" business and everything was proceeding swimmingly.
Then it installed the "WD Smartware"...

WD Smartware is the Western Digital software that manages the backing up of files and, as such, it is a fine concept. As far as I can tell, it monitors the files on your PC and backs up any that have changed since they were last backed up. Even if the Passport isn't plugged into the PC, the software lurks in the background somehow and carries on looking for stuff that is overdue for saving.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to this seemingly sensible data security scheme. The WD Smartware appears to have clobbered the performance of my PC.
Bearing in mind that I didn't want a foolproof backup regime, simply needing an external drive where I could save data independent of the main computer, this is really very annoying.
If I'd wanted to have software on my computer that slows everything down and prevents me from getting the performance I expect, I'm sure there are hordes of miscreants who would be only too happy to infect my machine with a helpful virus or other malware. I didn't need to pay Western Digital for the privelege of having them cripple my PC.

I'm not the only person that is suffering with this.
The Western Digital Community Forum is seething with posts from angry customers demanding that there should be a way of removing the offending software. Whether anybody at WD will be inclined to give the customers what they want rather than what WD think is good for them remains to be seen.
Until that time (should it ever happen) I'm stuck with what is undoubtedly an excellent bit of hardware that I cannot use thanks to software that crushes the performance of the very machine that said hardware was bought to protect.

...yes, this is just how I'm feeling

Say goodbye to Internet Explorer Misery

I had one of those problems that beset every computer user once in a while; the inexplicable and apparently unprovoked failure of software that was previously working properly.

I tried to launch Internet Explorer, my internet browser of choice, and "Boink!". . . it wouldn't work. After a couple of fruitless re-tries, I decided to check whether there were any Microsoft updates that I'd missed. Unfortunately, I couldn't get to the appropriate site, because my browser was broken.

"Damn. I know. I'll download 'Firefox' . . .", and, of course you've already realized the problem, I couldn't do that either because MY BROWSER WAS BROKEN.

Did I hear someone whisper "Catch 22"?

Happily, I remembered that whenever iTunes throws me a software update, it tries to give me its web-browser too, so I opened up iTunes and asked for an update. There it was, 'Safari'. The downloading didn't require any web-browser registration nonsense, and was completely painless. 

So now I'm using 'Safari'. It's supposed to be nearly twice as fast as 'Explorer' and more secure as well. It seems OK, and it has allowed me to download the 2 new updates from the Microsoft site that are to address urgent security issues with Internet Explorer. Hmmm! Could it be these 'issues' that were original cause of my problems?