How to Turn Off Dashboard (OS X 10.4)

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This month's MacAddict has a nice tip for turning the dashboard on and off in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). This is useful if you find things running slowly due to memory issues, like I did on my G3 iBook.

I didn't see this anywhere on the forums, so I'm putting it here now. :)

(Mods, I didn't know if this belongs here or in the OS forum-- move it if you see fit.)


Turning off Dashboard
----
Open a terminal window and enter this:

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

and then enter:

killall Dock


Turning on Dashboard
----
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

and then enter:

killall Dock
 
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Thanks for the information... Why would you want to turn dashboard of any way?
 
W

wolf88

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PowerBookG4 said:
Thanks for the information... Why would you want to turn dashboard of any way?

Well it drains battery life significantly on my iBook for one. And it slows down older Macs and Macs with less RAM.
 
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Thanx, maybe I will set turn dashboard off to save battery life.
 
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PowerBookG4 said:
Thanks for the information... Why would you want to turn dashboard of any way?
Ummm... read my original posting above.

me said:
This is useful if you find things running slowly due to memory issues, like I did on my G3 iBook.
I think Dashboard is cool, but the only things I've found useful are the calculator, dictionary, and weather widgets. The other widgets add little value to my computing experience.

This is why, on my G3 iBook (my secondary iBook), I turned Dashboard off-- I think the memory is better used for running actual programs.
 
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i turned it off just because i hardly used it. each widget takes up a pretty big chunk of memory (take look in activity monitor)
 
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COULD YOU EXPLAIN terminal window? does mean a widget?
 
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iNAP said:
COULD YOU EXPLAIN terminal window? does mean a widget?

Nope. It's an application.

Applications --> Utilities --> Terminal

It'll give you a UNIX prompt. A little slice 'o' Heaven for those of us who cut our teeth on Sun UNIX 3.2. :)

It's analogous to the MS-DOS prompt in Windows.
 

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