how is dashboard too slow? you have a 2.4 ghz macbook pro.
I just think its too slow. It took forever to load things on my PowerBook and when I got this new computer I thought ok, I'll give dashboard another try... it still sucks.
When you open it, it has to load every single widget and it takes forever and then when I'm not using it they are all still loaded. I have parallels with Windows going running Visual Studio as well as Aperture constantly and I'd just rather not have that slow down when I need to run Photoshop or Contribute.
I guess I just don't see why I should waste all that, albeit not that much, processor and memory, when Stattoo does the iCal, weather, time, mail, and iTunes notifications/jobs in a constant, unobtrusive, semitransparent way. For those few times that I need to look up movies, I copied the Movies widget from Leopard and used Amnesty Singles to make it an application that I use maybe once every two weeks. To top it off, the dashboard calculator is completely pointless if you use quicksilver constantly as I do because calculations require nothing but keystrokes without ever opening dashboard or the calculator application.
The one thing I really did use before I disbanded Dashboard was the stickies widget, but there is already a program called Stickies and my notes are generally a lot more complex I guess. I use Stickies almost daily but I wouldn't want to load up Dashboard just to use them.
I will say this: when I first switched to Mac two years ago I was gung-ho about the dashboard and I downloaded hoardes of widgets... till I started to realize there are better options and a simple web browser tends to be sufficient.