Free Up Resources With DashQuit
The Dashboard was one of the marquee new features in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger when it was introduced in the spring of 2005 — a sort of Desktop alternate universe accessed through the Dock as a home and interface for an assortment of mini-applications and utilities called Widgets.
Those who liked it, liked it a lot, it seems. Hundreds of Dashboard Widgets have been developed by third-parties in addition to the variety bundled with OS X by Apple.
Personally, I’ve never really warmed to the Dashboard, and rarely use it — by “rarely” I mean a frequency of probably less than once a month on average, and there is no Dashboard Widget I would really miss having available.
On the other hand, Dashboard is something of a resources hog, and being a user of older, low-end hardware, I begrudge the amounts of RAM, processor cycles, and swapfile access that get absorbed by the Dashboard. For example, the old Pismo PowerBook I’m typing this article on has a 550 MHz G4 processor and just 576 MB of RAM, and my most powerful Mac at this time is a 2004 vintage 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook with a still-modest by today’s standards 1.5 GB of RAM. It would be great if Apple had provided the option to manually quit the Dashboard in OS X, but for whatever reason, they didn’t.
Fortunately, it’s still not that difficult to disable the Dashboard and free up those resources, and in fact if you take a minute or two to download a little utility called DashQuit, it’s super-simple.
Just install the DashQuit Widget, click on the Stop button, confirm your intention to quit Dashboard, and it will go dormant as the Dock quits and relaunches. To re-enable the Dashboard, just open it by clicking on Dashboard or its icon in the Dock and it wakes up again. Simple, convenient, and painless.
When DashQuit launches it computes the percentage of memory (RAM) that Dashboard is using and displays it in the little screen. Here’s the readout on my Pismo running OS 10.4.11 Tiger — a whopping 18.3 percent of memory being sucked up by a feature I virtually never use.
There are three versions of DashQuit — all of which are quite small:
- 3.0 for Leopard (48.9k)
- 2.1 for Tiger (130k)
- 1.0 for Tiger (322k)
At the low, low cost of free, I highly recommend this…especially if you’re not a frequent Dashboard user, and running less than cutting-edge hardware.
#1 Brandon says:I’ve actually got a request for just the opposite. One of the things I liked about Vista was the “Sidebar” (kind of like their version of Dashboard) was always visible, just like the Dock on MACs.
That made it easy to quickly glance over and see the current weather, stock quotes, etc. from any screen.
But with Dashboard, you have to trigger it yourself, so do you know if there’s anything that will make the widgets a permanent fixture along the side of the screen?
#2 Noel says:Awesome. I literally use my dashboard calculator once a week and don’t need it the rest of the time.
#3 Jason says:Or you could just go with:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
then
killall Dock
#4 David B says:Nice article, thanks for the tip!
#5 Patrick says:Just curious - have you noticed any performance difference in your daily computer use with the dashboard turned off?
#6 Jim says:Dashboard reminds me of Sherlock back in the OS 8.X days. Really cool technology that never took off because it was too much work to use. Apple really needs to make an option to at least turn it off, though an option to not install it at all would be nice.
#7 Tod says:Though I’ve never used Vista (or any windows after 95), I agree with Brandon above. I have a 23″ display and I tend to use the edges for all sorts of things, with the Dock on the right edge. I also like the gesture launcher, Sapiens.
What I’d like to see is the Dashboard available as a pop-out thing like the Dock that is easily accessible on an edge, something that could conceivably co-exist on the same edge as the Dock by just clicking the Dashboard icon on the Dock and the Dock disappears and the Widget bar appears. Or maybe a gesture-based opening of the Dashboard. In any case, I know I’d use the Widgets more if they didn’t all display on my screen and were easier to access.
-Tod
#8 Brandon says:Thanks Tod, it seemed like I was the only one that didn’t hate the Dashboard, haha.
My so-so solution was to program a button on my mouse, so I just press it and the Dashboard appears.
That’s fast and easy, but I would still prefer to be able to keep the widgets along one side of the screen, visible at all times.
With Vista, it was very handy to keep up with stocks and weather throughout the day by simply glancing over at the sidebar without any other action needed.
#9 Charles Moore says:Patrick wrote:
“Just curious - have you noticed any performance difference in your daily computer use with the dashboard turned off?”
Not tangibly on the 1.3 GHz G4 with 1.5 MB of RAM, athough I imagine every bit helps, but definitely a noticable liveliness improvement on my two Pismos running Tiger, which have 576 MB and 640 MB of RAM respectively, especially after several days of uptime without a reboot.
CM
#10 Tod says:@Brandon: That mouse button trick sounds good. Unfortunately I have a two-button mouse and the right button is the usual “control-click” that brings up context menus.
How did you program your (3rd?) mouse button to bring up Dashboard? I’d be interested…
And yes, I like the weather, an NFL scoreboard, Symbol Caddy, and a Pythagorean Theorem that is useful for me. WRT the calculator, I’ve never liked onscreen calcs. I have my trusty HP 32S at my side all the time and it’s easier and faster (for me) than trying to type numbers into a screen keypad.
-Tod
#11 Brandon says:I have the VX Revolution mouse, and I love it. It’s small enough to travel with, but large enough to use as an everyday mouse.
It’s got a ton of customizeable buttons, and I’ve got one of them set to bring up Dashboard with a simple click, highly recommended!
#12 Brandon says:Tod, I found a temporary solution at:
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dashboard_widgets_on_my_mac_os_x_desktop.html
It seems to work well so far, but I just did it, so I’m not sure if the widgets like weather and stocks update automatically under this setup.
If not, I also came across another software that’s designed specifically for this, but obviously, I’d prefer the free version if it works:
http://www.amnestywidgets.com/WidgetBrowser.html