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.

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  • markktv
    I wrote a simple AppleScript app and it does simply this. Drop it on your Dock and Enable/Disable Dashboard with 3 clicks
    http://www.mark-up.com/apple.stuff/dashboard.en...
  • Thomas Edwards
    Alternatively, you could just remove it from the clock so you don't click on it. Then go into System Preferences and stop it from appearing when you press F12. Restart and it won't appear.

    Just a slightly less geeky of doing it :)
  • webman2k
    I remember when Tiger came out, and the widgets would take up about 20-30 megs of real memory each. If you had 512 or less memory, this tip was great to improve performance.

    But recent updates to Tiger have seen new memory optimized widgets. I have a couple of widgets open (calculator, weather, dictionary, sticky, etc.) and all take up around 6-8 megs of real memory each). If you have a widget that's taking up 260 megs of real memory, it's time to get a new widget.
  • The Dock is nice but until I get more RAM, I'm going to keep it disabled. Great tip, thanks!
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