WaasMedic Agent Exe stopping me from working

Lisa Larkin,

First I made a full backup of my system drive to an external USB drive (Seagate Backup Plus). Then I created "Acronis Rescue Media" on a thumb drive from my backup software, Acronis True Image 2021. Not real straight forward. It took a little doing to create the media with bootable WinPE recovery media and the True Image backup / restore software on it as well to a USB thumb drive. (Other apps like Partition Magic might make this process easier).

Next I went into the BIOS and set USB at the top of the EUFI boot order. (NOTE: My SYS drive was set to GPT EUFI boot, not MBR format.) Powered down, disconnected the power and data cables from the existing SYS HD and installed the SSD. I installed a 2TB Samsung 970 Plus NVMe M.2 PCIe3 x 4 SSD using a PCIe 3 x16 adapter card rather than a SATA SSD (mostly for speed). The hardware install was a piece of cake.

I unplugged the Seagate drive, plugged the (bootable) Rescue Media thumb drive into a USB slot, powered up and it booted to a WinRE window, then started True Image backup/restore application. At that point I plugged in the external Seagate USB drive with the full SYS drive backup and restored it (with all the partitions (EFI, C:Windows, Recovery Image partition ...) to the SSD. Then I powered down, unplugged the rescue media and Seagate drives, powered back up and used the function key during the boot process to access the BIOS to set PCIe to the top of the EUFI boot order and restarted. It all booted up fine, and I tested for a few days to make sure all my apps and docs etc were operating / accessible as expected. I used Disk Manager to make sure my drive letters for my internal SATA and external eSATA RAIDs and optical drive were the same as before, and that C: was assigned to the "Windows" partition of the SSD.

Then I double-checked that SATA was not first in the BIOS boot order (PCIe was first as set before). With the machine powered down, I reconnected the old SYS drive and powered back up again double checking that I had booted from the SSD and that the old SYS drive had a letter other than C. It turns out that I needed to use the command line utility, "DiskPart" to delete the EFI, recovery and another small reserved partition on the old SYS HD before I could use Disk Manager to format it. (I just formatted it as one 2 TB volume and set the letter low in the alphabet.) I created "Documents", "Pictures", "Music" and "Videos" folders on the reformatted HD to serve as targets for the move operations. After that I simply used the File Explorer->This PC->Documents->Properties Location tab to move "Documents" (repeated for "Music", "Pictures ...) to the reformatted HD. With rare exception the installed applications had no problem redirecting themselves to the moved docs/content locations.

Yes it's possible to stop the service but to shut it down you have to do a Reg Hack and even then M$ will turn it back on after an update or I've seen it restart without an update. You can't disable it from Services. Access Denied even from an Admin Account:

Isn't it possible to simply disable this executable in Services?

I recently caught a service or program running that was innocuously labelled Outlook Updater or something like it. However Outlook is not installed on this machine, so what was it doing and why?

So I just ordered a SSD as I have finally given up on this brick with 1TB SATA. When it's delivered, I'm curious about this part of your post....

But still, to be safe, I moved "Documents", "Pictures", "Music" and "Videos" to the hard drive that used to be to boot volume

Did you install windows and programs on the SSD, and leave the other SATA drive in place and just change where windows boots from and access files from your SATA drive?

Would you provide some additional info as I was planning to rebuild everything on the new 1TB SSD. I would really like them to not be able to mine my data so I'm super interested in how to achieve this.

I have been experiencing this for almost a year, and Dell has been good to me in trying to solve the issue, but I was the one that came across this thread and sent it to them. In the past, they replaced my new computer with another model, replaced mother boards, replaced hard drives multiple times, but still 100% disk. Now... they are telling me, after reading this thread to go SSD, but won't provide one for free. I don't blame them since it's MS, not Dell Hardware, so I had to buy an SSD for this 1 year old computer and I can only hope that from this thread, that it fixes the problem.