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Lucky736

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 18, 2004
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Anyone know how to turn this off so it doesn't start up? No point since I won't use it and on my G3 iBook it seems Tiger is slower and I think this may be why.
 
Actually, Dashboard doesn't use much memory at all, unlike its memory hog of a cousin Konfabulator. In fact, the only thing taking up memory is the widgets themselves.
 
I don't know if you can turn it off. But...I do know that widgets use more resources than dashboard. If you don't drag any widgets from your widget bar to the desktop, dashboard will use almost no resources because no widgets will be in memory.

Edit: beaten to the punch :(
 
My dock doesnt seem terribly responsive, seems choppy, so I was thinking dashboard had something to do with it. 10.3.9 was butter
 
Lucky736 said:
My dock doesnt seem terribly responsive, seems choppy, so I was thinking dashboard had something to do with it. 10.3.9 was butter


Are you sure Spotlight isn't still indexing? Everything will be a little slow until it is finished. Could take an hour or more.
 
Open up Dashboard, make all widgets NOT running (ie close them) and then just change the hot key/hot corner to nothing and Dashboard will just be an idle background process that doesn't ever do anything.

It really doesn't use much at all for ram or processing power.

How fast is your iBook's processor?
Is it a G3 or G4?
What type of install did you do?
 
Lucky736 said:
My dock doesnt seem terribly responsive, seems choppy, so I was thinking dashboard had something to do with it. 10.3.9 was butter

I have the same problem on my eMac. The dock grow/shrink effect, expose, genie effect, even scrolling up and down was very choppy with Tiger installed. I don't understand why, but I had to go back to Panther to get everything nice and smooth again. And yes, I wanted an entire day to let everything index and it was still choppy.
 
Jigglelicious said:
I have the same problem on my eMac. The dock grow/shrink effect, expose, genie effect, even scrolling up and down was very choppy with Tiger installed. I don't understand why, but I had to go back to Panther to get everything nice and smooth again. And yes, I wanted an entire day to let everything index and it was still choppy.

Your emac is faster, and has more ram than my powerbook, but it's all butter here. How much do you have running?
 
Kingsnapped said:
Your emac is faster, and has more ram than my powerbook, but it's all butter here. How much do you have running?

Regardless on Tiger his eMac is slow and choppy and on Panther it is not, and the point is Apple should be making it FASTER with updates.
 
Dashboard is not like Konfabulator which is a pure add-on app on the top of the OS. Konfabulator is a memory eater which will slow down any machine's performance.

Dashboard actually untilize almost 0% CPU and Memory usage when its not being actived (brought to the front). There should be no performance difference if you disable it or not even on a G3 iBook.
 
The problem here might be the GPU

Okay, I'm only a designer, and only understand an inkling of OS X's engine, but I was reading something on the Ars Technica review of Tiger that sounded similar to the issues people are having here with Tiger's graphics being choppy.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/1

The review said something about the eye candy in Tiger requiring a programmable GPU. I also remember reading that iBooks and eMacs do not have programmable GPU's whereas PowerBooks do. Could this be a root of the problem? If anybody knows more about this issue, I'm curious to find out. Hope this helps, or at least is a point in the right direction by any luck.

Cheers
 
I heard that Quartz Extreme was disabled by default in tiger... maybe i misread.. can anyone actually confirm this? they said it had to be enabled ina debug menu... NOTE I COULD BE WRONG.. so don't flip out until someone actually confirms...
 
I don't think you can turn dashboard off, it doesn't have any windows and can't take menu focus. It's also coupled with expose in the prefs panel, which suggests it's just part of the OS like expose. For what it's worth, I noticed significant performance gains in Tiger even compared to the already fast Panther. Of course, I have a programmable GPU, but Tiger is much faster for me.
 
DXoverDY said:
I heard that Quartz Extreme was disabled by default in tiger... maybe i misread.. can anyone actually confirm this? they said it had to be enabled ina debug menu... NOTE I COULD BE WRONG.. so don't flip out until someone actually confirms...

Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default in Tiger. Regular Quartz Extreme is still in effect. Depending upon your graphic card, this may be of little consequence to some.
 
toneloco2881 said:
Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default in Tiger. Regular Quartz Extreme is still in effect. Depending upon your graphic card, this may be of little consequence to some.

ok what exactly is the difference? 2D extreme just a drawing package? kinda taking over whatever it was called...
 
Yes, I heard something similar. I heard you had to go to some sort of Debug menu to turn on Quartz Extreme, but I'm not sure if there's a difference between Quartz 2D Extreme and Quartz Extreme. Actually, I thought Quartz Extreme only handled 2D, while CoreImage now handles 3D.
 
Abstract said:
Yes, I heard something similar. I heard you had to go to some sort of Debug menu to turn on Quartz Extreme, but I'm not sure if there's a difference between Quartz 2D Extreme and Quartz Extreme. Actually, I thought Quartz Extreme only handled 2D, while CoreImage now handles 3D.

If there is a shadow behind your pointer arrow, like mine has behind it right now, Quartz Extreme is active. I am not sure about Quartz 2D however. This little program will tell you if your video card supports it and if it is active as well.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/mac/15911&mode=feedback
 
Why do these "widgets" take up so much memory? A calculator using 17 megs of RAM is insane.
 
So theres no way to turn it off. Like the poster said earlier, if it has the black arrow it is running. I could care less about dashboard.
 
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