How to Disable Dashboard - Use Onyx
Onyx is great. It’s a great maintenance tool for checking your disk, cleaning up logs and caches, running maintenance scripts. But it also lets you access other settings that you can’t (or are hard to get to) in your System Preferences.
For example, I don’t use Dashboard all that much. But it still eats resources. I’d rather just ditch it. (I know it doesn’t load widgets until you access the Dashboard, but sometimes you do it by accident, the widgets load, and, bam, there’s 50+ MB of RAM being consumed.)
Go into Onyx. You can skip/cancel the dialogs about checking your disk—but make sure to run them at some point. Click on Parameters, the Dashboard and Expose tab, and the unselect the Enable Dashboard and its Widgets option. That simple.
I used to think, eh, my Mac maintains itself pretty well by itself. If not, then I can do the maintenance I need to by hand. But it’s the way they organize the options to turn things on/off and run your maintenance tasks that really makes it worth the free download.