How to disable Dashboard (aka ‘the RAM hog’)

Ever been curious about what’s slowing down your system, only to open up Activity Monitor and see something like this:
dashboard.png

Well, if you’re like me and have found Dashboard to be far less useful than we thought it would be oh so long ago, then you can disable it, using the helpful commands found over on Macworld.

Read on for instructions.

Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

This tells the system that you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. However, the Dashboard task is actually “owned” by the Dock, so to make your changes take effect, you need to restart the Dock. The easiest way to do that is to type this command into the Terminal (and press Return when done):

killall Dock

After the Dock restarts, hit F12 and you’ll see…nothing at all. If you run Activity Monitor, you also won’t find any Dashboard widgets in the list of tasks, even if you had several open when you ran the above command. Dashboard has been eliminated from your system, and won’t return until you tell it to do so. You can do just that by opening Terminal again, and typing this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Once again, you’ll have to use the killall Dock command to make the changes take effect. Once you do, though, you’ll find that Dashboard is back as usual—and any widgets you had opened on the Dashboard will still be open.

Viewing 3 Comments

 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

  • http://www.kernel-panic.fr

    January 7, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    Delicious: mac ThemeChangerBombich Software: Carbon Copy ClonerReview: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista - News ...

  • reddiggulo.us - The Most Recent Popular Stories

    January 7, 2007 at 8:53 pm

    BabyGotMac » How to disable Dashboard (aka ‘the RAM hog’) - Mac stuff that gets you sprung [IMG More ...

  • idealist future

    January 8, 2007 at 1:10 am

    del.icio.us [IMG RSS] How to disable Dashboard (aka ‘the RAM hog’) - Mac stuff that gets you sprung ...

  • ARTbird309’s Blog

    January 8, 2007 at 1:21 am

    BabyGotMac » How to disable Dashboard (aka ‘the RAM hog’) - Mac stuff that gets you sprung

  • Lawsy.net

    January 9, 2007 at 6:20 am

    How to disable Dashboard

  • Tim's Reflection Connection

    January 14, 2007 at 4:08 pm

    Once again, you’ll have to use the killall Dock command to make the changes take effect. Once you do, though, ...

  • LiveMarks

    January 21, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    BabyGotMac » How to disable Dashboard (aka ‘the RAM hog’) - Mac stuff that gets you sprung ★ ...

  • AndyMelton.net » Blog Archive » My First Mac

    February 12, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    [...] After I had gotten everything updated I disabled the Dashboard (not Expose). Dashboard used quite a bit of memory. ...

  • DigitalDiscoBash.com

    February 12, 2007 at 10:02 pm

    I immediately ran the system updater which brought the OS up to version 10.4.8 from 10.4.3 which was on the ...

  • Tech Butter » Blog Archive » My First Mac

    November 9, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    [...] updated I disabled the Dashboard (not Expose). Dashboard used quite a bit of memory. I followed this guide to ...

close Reblog this comment
blog comments powered by Disqus