How to Disable the Dashboard on Mac OS X Leopard

Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets are a great addition to your Mac, adding everything from calendar applications, calculators and even guitar tuners with the press of the "F12" key. Still, all of the convenience of the Dashboard Widgets does have its price--they are RAM- and power-hungry, even when the Dashboard is closed, so you may want to turn off Dashboard Widgets in Mac OS X 10.5 by following these steps.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. 
   Mac OS X Terminal Application

   Click on “Applications” in a Finder window and find the “Utilities” folder. Open the “Utilities” folder and locate the “Terminal” application. Double-click the “Terminal” application to launch it.

2. 

   In an open terminal window, type in the following command (without the quotes and the period at the end) and hit “enter/return” to kill the Dashboard process: “defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES.”

3. The next command to type into Terminal tells the Dock to restart. Once again (without the quotes), type in a “killall Dock” command and hit "Enter."

4. If you ever wish to use Dashboard again, simply type in the following commands to return Dashboard to its full functionality: “defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO” and “killall Dock.”