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The Dashboard app in Mac OS X 10.4 takes up much more RAM and CPU time than you may think.

Once it has been activated for the first time after you start up, it remains active in the background, consuming perhaps 7-10MB RAM per widget and a significant amount of CPU time. I have 11 widgets loaded right now. Those widgets together use over 80MB of RAM!!

When I'm transcoding video or playing games, I want all of the RAM and CPU time that I can get for that task. So I quit Dashboard. I keep a little AppleScript applet in the Dock for just such a purpose.

Here's the trick: Dashboard loads as a Dock process so the script actually quits the Dock. (The Desktop picture is also a Dock process, so don't worry if it reloads when you run the script.) So long as the Finder is running, the Dock will reload, but it won't automatically reactivate Dashboard. You've reclaimed all of that RAM until the next time you tap or click the Dashboard icon in the Dock.

Just copy and paste this code into the Script Editor and save it as an application.

tell application "Dock"
quit
end tell

Yep. Just 3 lines of code after that long description. It's that easy.