Widgets are painfully slow.

Question

Widgets are painfully slow.

I consider the Dashboard/Widgets running on Tiger on my 12" PowerBook to be nothing but a boondoggle. A superfluous bell or whistle added to Tiger to justify a switch to Tiger for all the people not interested in Automator, Spotlight, and...Mail2?. First, they load painfully slowly. Second, they seem to occasionally reset their preferences (weather in San Cupertino?...umm,no) Third they do not provide information that I can't get to more quickly using Safari. Is there a reason why they are running so slowly? Is there a way to juice-up their performance? I have them on my G5 PowerMac as well. They're a bit quicker, but still not quick enough to use them more than seldomly. I feel like I must be missing out on all the hoopla only because it's such a chore waiting for the darn things to load. But then what? My homepage has the temperature, my finder bar has the time, date and Gmail notifier. How can I enjoy Dashboard and what am I missing? I just don't get it and need help. Thanks. A countdown timer to Rent? Ughh!

PowerMac Dual 2.5 GHz 1gig DDR SDRAM, Mac OS X (10.4.6), 12" PowerBook 867MHz PowerPC G4, 640 MB DDR SDRAM/

Posted on May 17, 2006 8:22 AM

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Answer 1

macnavi

Level 2

475 points

May 17, 2006 3:40 PM in response to Montserrat Serra

I have a faster PowerBook 12", but I find them slow to load to. But I think it's the connection to the Internet that holds them up. They all want to access the Internet. But you might upgrade to more memory, if you really want more increased speed. I felt that putting 1 GB extra in my PB really gives that extra "snappiness". Still, the widgets are slow. Also remember, any widget opened takes about 30 MB of your memory (after you have started dashboard once). So don't have any open if you don't use it.

On a sidenote, the most useless Widget is the Google widget... Why would you open Dashboard to access a searchbar, when it will open Safari which has the same searchbar. Why do two steps if you can do it in one?

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Answer 2

May 18, 2006 9:28 AM in response to Montserrat Serra

"Repair Disk Permissions" from Disk Utility may help.
Also, try the same using a different user account to see what happens.

Mihalis.

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