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.