iMac / Leopard confusion

[dayloon]

Hi all,

sorry if this is a silly question, I've only been a mac user for 24 hrs.

Yesterday I took delivery if a 27" i7 iMac with 8gb ram. From what I've read, even though leopard is a 64bit OS, by default it boots up in 32bit mode. Should I be booting it in 64bit mode or not?

 

[r0k]

Hi all,

sorry if this is a silly question, I've only been a mac user for 24 hrs.

Yesterday I took delivery if a 27" i7 iMac with 8gb ram. From what I've read, even though leopard is a 64bit OS, by default it boots up in 32bit mode. Should I be booting it in 64bit mode or not?

Not worth bothering with. I ran into an issue after installing Snow Leopard that it wanted to run a 64 bit JVM but software I was installing absolutely depended on the presence of a 32 bit JVM. I had to go into system preferences and fall back to the 32 bit Java temporarily to get the software installed.

If your machine is running "fast enough" for you, don't waste a moment's thought on how many bits the OS thinks it is using. You will know if you have a problem if you try to install software that complains about the OS. Until this happens, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Hi all,

sorry if this is a silly question, I've only been a mac user for 24 hrs.

Yesterday I took delivery if a 27" i7 iMac with 8gb ram. From what I've read, even though leopard is a 64bit OS, by default it boots up in 32bit mode. Should I be booting it in 64bit mode or not?

If a program you're using is a 64 bit program then it will run in 64 bit even if you've booted into the 32 bit Snow Leopard. To check this open up Mail.app and then Activity Monitor (look in your Applications/Utilities folder) you'll see that Mail.app has (64 bit) next to it.

 

[r0k]

If a program you're using is a 64 bit program then it will run in 64 bit even if you've booted into the 32 bit Snow Leopard. To check this open up Mail.app and then Activity Monitor (look in your Applications/Utilities folder) you'll see that Mail.app has (64 bit) next to it.

Oops. I didn't know that. After my little misadventure with Matlab, I thought this would not be the case. Thanks!