Knowledgebase
How to remove the shopping cart sidebar in Magento
By default, in one of the columns on the frontend of your Magento site there's a My Cart sidebar. If you want to hide this shopping cart sidebar, you can very easily do that from the admin panel of your Magento. After you log in go to System menu>Configuration>Checkout button in the Sales section on the left>Shopping Cart Sidebar panel on the right. Expand the panel and set the drop-down menu Display Shopping Cart Sidebar to No. Don't forget to click on the Save Config button.
For more information on how to remove some of the other sidebars and links checkout the tutorial on removing default blocks in Magento and the one on removing default sidebars and links in Magento that cannot be removed by using the admin panel.