The solution was to follow Macworlds article on disabling the Dashboard. That procedure involved opening the Terminal application and running the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Telling OSX you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. Since Dashboard is actually owned by the Dock you need to restart the Dock by again in Terminal typing:

killall Dock

After that, there should be no more Dashboard, or Dashboard tasks.

Given that I never ever run Dashboard, I thought I’d just check to see how much RAM Dashboard was actually gobbling up on my iMac, so I ran Activity Monitor to find out. Strangely there was nothing listed, even if I ran Dashboard itself, nothing showed up if I filter on Dash..

This got me thinking, and I came to the conclusion that Dashboard is actually part of the OS (or Dock) and it’s only the Widgets themselves that eat memory. I had months ago removed all the widgets from Dashboard (clicking the x to close them when Dashboard was up and running) effectively leaving Dashboard empty.

Adding a widget back in, resulted in the same behavior others had seen, a Dashclient application eating memory. Removing it, made all the Dashclient tasks vanish again.

So the bottom line is, simply opening dashboard and removing all widgets from the heads up display by use of the close button on the widgets, results in the same effect as detailed in the MacWorld article.

The Mac Mini comes in the nice slick anodized-aluminum box we’re so used to now from Apple, and houses a slot-loading drive (DVD/CD-R), DVI/VGA port, Ethernet 10/100, USB 2.0, Firewire, audio out, a v.92 56k modem. Big box, but TINY at only 6 x 6 x 2.5 inches and 1.4kg!

Us prive is about $499 with a 1.25GHz G4 processor and 40GB hard drive, and $599 with a 1.42GHz CPU and an 80GB drive. UK prices are