Disable Dashboard To Free Memory

Don't use the Dashboard feature much? Granted it's cool, but at a price. And unless you use it actively it is probably slowing your Mac.
Dashboard uses a lot of memory and bandwidth to keep all those little baby programs running and updated for when you need them. If you don't need them this is how you do it:

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

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

This command informs the system that you don't want Dashboard enabled anymore. But there is one more step. Dashboard is operated under the dock preferences and is therefore controlled, in a sense, by it. To make the command your just wrote take affect you need to type this into the terminal and press return when you are done.

killall Dock

After the dock restarts Dashboard will no longer be operational.

To reinstate Dashboard you simply type this into the terminal and hit return when you are done:

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

Once again type in killall Dock to put the changes in effect. The Dashboard will work great after it's nap and all your widgets will be there as they were before.

Comments?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ok, wow.
First:
Dashboard is fully closed on login. It stays closed until you open it.
Second: It's not using a LOT of power at all. 0% cpu, 50 mb of ram? Not much.
Thirdly: Do you have 2.5 GB of ram? THAT'S your problem right there. Get two matched, 1 gb cards, it'll run faster than whatever setup you have now. Do a search for Dual channel mode.

Unknown said...

I think the bigger issue is the amount of virtual memory it uses. BTW, that is not my Mac in the pic.

Post a Comment