Comments on: Enabling 64-Bit in Snow Leopard

By: Enabling 64Bit Mode in Snow Leopard — carmody.me

Enabling 64Bit Mode in Snow Leopard — carmody.me — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:13:52 +0000

[...] After a quick google search I found the answer to this question with a clear and concise article on Stephen J Burke's Blog. [...]

By: macJasp

macJasp — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:01:36 +0000

It works. Thanks for the article, nice to know my Macbook Pro is running in 64Bit mode permanently. Now we just need the likes of iTunes to be in 64Bit

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:40:38 +0000

Check to see what processor you have. Despite the software checks, really only the more recent Intel based Macs carrying the Intel Core 2 Duo chips are actually 64 bit. Those and the Xeon processors, which may have only been in the server line. All of the previous generations have not been 64 bit.
If you do have a newer machine with Intel Core 2 Duo, then there is no real reason it is not working.
Stephen
Stephen

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:36:12 +0000

Tried the 4 and 6 keystroke combination – no luck
Edited the com.apple.Boot.plist file – no luck
verified the Mac is 64 bit compliant hardware wise with sysctl hw | grep 64bit

Reviewing the status in Profiler for software, still shows no for 64 bit and extensions.

Is there another step I can try?

Thanks.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:53:24 +0000

@Tad I am not sure when the timing of holding the keys is important. I pressed them shortly after hearing the boot tone and held out there until after the apple screen went away. As far as editing the file, you need to have superuser access, in order to modify files that will affect the boot record. You can do some searches on how to enable superuser access. Here is what I do for reference. Some people do not feel comfortable working at the command line level. I open a Terminal session from Applications. Then I use the sudo command to invoke superuser permissions to open a shell session in that terminal. Finally I use pico to edit the file. Applications -> Terminal sudo -s type in your password pico /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist edit the file Control-X to exit with prompting to save. Hope this helps. Stephen

By: Tad

Tad — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:31:06 +0000

Tried holding down “64″ at start up-no luck; System Profiler still reported “No”.

Next tried editing the Boot; had to change permissions; tried to save and was told that the file could not be saved.