How to Reset Dashboard on Mac OSX Leopard

About: Is your Mac OSX Leopard Dashboard having issues like freezing, stop responding or hangs when you open it?

This topic is a solution if your Mac OSX Leopard Dashboard is not working properly. This procedure will reset the settings of your Dashboard to a default settings.

1. Go to ~/Library/Preferences/

2. Delete the following files:

  • com.apple.dashboard
  • com.apple.dashboard.client

3. Restart the unit and access the Dashboard again to see if it was fixed.

5 comments
  1. Joey October 16th, 2009 5:26 pm :

    Why not just open Terminal, and use:
    defaults delete com.apple.Dashboard

  2. sprale April 30th, 2010 5:51 pm :

    @Joey October; both options work well. Generally, non-technical users will have issues with Dashboard and have no idea what you’ve just suggested…

  3. Joey September 10th, 2010 2:09 pm :

    I suppose.

    defaults delete com.apple.Dashboard
    killall Dock

    Is instant.

  4. Tante September 1st, 2011 12:30 am :

    I didn’t have the files listed above in Finder–mine had “plist” in the name, and I’m enough of a Mac novice that I wasn’t sure if I could delete them safely–but I do know Terminal a bit, and the commands in the comments worked for me, so thanks!

  5. Lionel October 9th, 2011 1:18 am :

    Worked perfectly. Thank you.

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