Recently, I bought a new 500GB hard drive from Western Digital. This despite the fact that the salesman told me external drives will soon be a thing of the past. All will be in The Cloud. I'm all for cloud storage, but I still like to have some of my data on a drive I can hold in my hand.
I still read books, too. Paper ones.
But back to the matter at hand.
What you see is the entirety of the instructions for installing the drive. And it really was that simple: I plugged one end of the cord into the drive and the other into a USB port on the computer; Windows 7 recognized the device, installed the drivers, and almost before I could blink, it was ready to go. I wasn't expecting anything less; what made the experience noteworthy was subsequently reading the somewhat different instructions located in the instruction manual—which is a pdf located on the drive itself. They begin as follows:
- Turn on your computer.
- Connect the My Passport drive to your computer as shown in Figure 3.
- If a Found New Hardware screen appears, click Cancel to close it. The WD SmartWare software that is on the drive installs the proper driver for your My Passport drive.
They continue with instructions for making that installation happen. But as should have been obvious to the manual-writers, the "Found New Hardware" screen isn't up long enough to cancel it. And in any case, you can't read the instructions to cancel the installation until after you've finished the installation.
I ignored it all, and the drive works fine.
Maybe they have the PDF there in case you want to connect it to another computer and you chucked the printed instructions because you didn't consider them worth cluttering up your house?
