How to disable the dashboard and spotlight for the latest Iion OS

Simply add all of your hard drived to the 'privacy' section of spotlight in system preferences to essentially disable it.

To disable dashboard, first open the dashboard, hold down the option key, mouse over every widget and delete it. Now go under System Preferences > Mission Control, and uncheck the box saying "Show Dashboard as a Space".

You're set!

to disable spotlight, open the terminal and type "sudo mdutil -a -i off" without the quotes. ( You will be prompted to enter your admin password.)

to disable dashboard:

Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key:

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

This tells the system that you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. However, the Dashboard task is actually “owned” by the Dock, so to make your changes take effect, you need to restart the Dock. The easiest way to do that is to type this command into the Terminal (and press Return when done):

killall Dock

After the Dock restarts, hit F12 and you’ll see…nothing at all. If you run Activity Monitor, you also won’t find any Dashboard widgets in the list of tasks, even if you had several open when you ran the above command.