Saving Ram without dashboard!
A great tip submitted by Hunter Evans (Hunter's website): Saving Ram without dashboard! I find widgets very efficient and I count widgets as better for productivity. Many people find widgets a waste of system resources however. It is true that many computers might not take as much advantage of widgets than personal computers. It is especially true on a video editing or production workstation and also on older Macs. You can really see the effect of widgets on Ram and processors when watching "Activity Monitor". There is a useful feature in OnyX that comes to the rescue by entirely disabling the dashboard to avoid having all these extra applications running in the background. OnyX is a free application for maintenance and customization that can be downloaded for free here on MacUpdate. This is the "Dashboard and Exposé" tab within the "Parameters" of OnyX where you can choose to enable or not dashboard:
posted by Frederic Tremblay at
5/27/2007
10 Comments:
yeah.I can see how some people could use this. I personally love my widgets.
Actually, you don't need an application to disable Dashboard. You may have noticed that the first time you open Dashboard after a reboot, all the widgets load there and then.
So if you never open Dashboard, the widgets never load into RAM. Just drag the dashboard icon out of your dock and remove the F12 keyboard shortcut by going into System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse / Keyboard Shortcuts.
And that way you actually save more RAM, because you don't have Onyx running.
Onyx is great, but too much fuss to open and close just to turn off widgets for a particular momentary need of RAM. Why not have your widgets and quit Dashboard quick when you need to free up RAM? For those who, like me, really enjoy and rely on widgets a lot but sometimes need to reclaim all the RAM possible for, say, Photoshop, there is--handily enough--a tiny widget that is just for the purpose of quitting Dashboard called DashQuit, found here: http://elaum.free.fr/Softwares/
There is a Widget called "Stop Dashboard" that you can click on to end Dashboard and free up Ram and CPU
Stop Dashboard is at http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19834
Type this into terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
Deactivates Dashboard. Requires the dock to be relaunched to take effect, so type "killall Dock" and press enter. Replace YES with NO to enable again.
Found that off a website with tons of terminal tips.
When I notice my Dashboard eats too much ram, I just restart my Dashboard via an incredibly simple AppleScript:
tell application "Dock"
quit
launch
end tell
Handy to free just that extra few mb ram when you need it :)
There are many ways of achieving this Dashboard disabling. Thanks for posting all the other ways. By the way Johan, OnyX modifies the system, you don't have to keep OnyX running once you changed the settings.
MacGeek
This comment has been removed by the author.
There is an option to (Stop Dashboard) also in activity monitor. However, I really like the dashboard widget feature for quick information-definitely a selling point for Mac. BTW thanks for the "Stop Dashboard" widget I can simply access it via a hot corner. Cheers.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home