#Final cut pro for mac os x 10.4.11 pro#

With Dashboard, if you start widgets that allocate 50 MB, and then go back to Word, you haven't lost 50 MB. Even with 78 processes active, only 2 or 3 are ever actually active, the rest, like Dashboard, are put to sleep. My PowerBook has 1.25 GB installed, but virtual memory is handling 8.20 GB of allocated RAM at the moment, and there isn't any obvious paging activity going on while I work. OS X basically assigns every application 4 GB of space, and only actively deals with memory that needs immediate access quite effeciently. Having 50 MB assigned isn't losing 10% of an installed 512 RAM. But if you load up various apps into RAM, and then don't use them, and they are swapped out to disk, no further disk swapping or RAM allocation is going to happen until to return to that app.

#Final cut pro for mac os x 10.4.11 pro#

SO, if you are trying to run every Adobe CS and Quark and Final Cut Pro on 512MB of RAM, you'll be swapping a lot.

Swapping pages from RAM to the HD can slow things down, but only if you are actively using more RAM than you have. Of course Dashboard uses CPU and RAM, but only if you have widgets loaded and are using it. Turning off Spotlight may make a difference, because Spotlight's indexing works every time a file is saved, and churns through things in the background, but turning off Dashboard is unnecessary tech voodoo and simply woolly thinking. If you are short on RAM, the data inactive apps use is copied off to your HD. They aren't assigned a chunk of your RAM chips. But under OS X, applications that are not actively running not only take no processing power, but the RAM they 'consume' is only a virtual allocation. Konfabulator not only takes up FAR MORE RAM, but RUNS ALL THE TIME.ĭashboard goes to sleep between F12 pokes, and the system isn't slowed in the slightest by the Dashboard icon having a triangle under it.Ĭlassic Mac OS users are often horrified to find apps open in the background and worry they are taking up processor and RAM. Apple's Dashboard only runs when you have it open that's why it's designed as it is, and why you can't run widgets outside of the dashboard layer without changing how Dashboard works.

Konfabulator is an interesting thing to bring up in the thread of turning off Dashboard. To turn Dashboard off: defaults write mcx-disabled -boolean YES To turn Dashboard on: defaults write mcx-disabled -boolean NO You have to restart the Dock after making either change for it to take effect: killall Dock Launch Terminal and then enter the following commands. So here it is, with thanks to the original poster who found it. In my case, I just don't use it, and dislike having applications running that I don't use or need.Īfter some searching, I found this hint, but didn't find anything similar on MacOSXHints. Some people have claimed memory or performance problems with Dashboard.