How to kill/disable the Dashboard in Mac OS X 10.9

OS X 10.9 is sucking the life out of my old Mac, a 2008 iMac. Like turning off everything on Star Trek’s Enterprise so you can give power to something else (like the engines or shields), I keep looking for ways to bring a little life back to it. One way I’ve read about is to kill the Dashboard on 10.9.

You can kill the Dashboard with this Mac OSX defaults command, issued in a Mac Terminal window:

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

(You do not need to proceed this command with a sudo command.)

After issuing that command, do a kilall on Dock processes like this:

killall Dock

Re-enabling the OS X Dashboard

If you later decide to re-enable the Dashboard, use this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

following again by the killall:

killall Dock

Source

I learned about this technique on this osxdaily.com web page. Other websites showed this technique, but their defaults commands were not correct, at least not as of June, 2014.