For those of you running Snow Leopard on newer Macs, you might be disappointed to know that you are probably running in 32-bit mode.  I have a brand new MacBook Pro and am running 32-bit.  I'd wager that some of you are too.  The problem: no matter how burly the hardware you are running is, Apple automatically puts you into 32-bit mode (Except Xserves).  Let's take a look at System Profiler:

Even though Apple has been hyping up the 64bit nature of its ucpoming Snow Leopard operating system, stating it will be the first Mac OS X release to be 64bit top-to-bottom, reality turns out to be a little bit different so far. With the current Snow Leopard seed, only Xserve users get the 64bit kernel and drivers - all other Macs default to 32bit.

Following Apple's lead of dropping the ageing PowerPC architecture for Snow Leopard, Adobe have outlined its plans for a PPC-free future in a recent blog entry. The next iteration of its Creative Suite, popular among designers and the like, will not only be going Intel-only, but will also be rewritten in Cocoa for 64-bit native support, a requirement for Adobe after Apple previously revealed they had scrapped plans for a 64-bit Carbon.

So you have been running Windows 7 x64 Beta, Release Candidate, or later on your Mac Pro and you want to update it to a clean install of the final RTM version.  There is the easy way and there is the hard way.  I have tried both so I will list them below and then give you steps on how to do it the ‘EASY’ way.

The time has come, August 6th is near, and that means that Windows 7 RTM will be available to a larger audience then it was when it was announced. For those that do not know, RTM stands for Released to Manufacturing….or FINAL Build that will be available in retail boxes on October 22nd. I, naturally, had a copy pretty early on so I could test my installs and sure enough not much has changed in the install process.

Snow Leopard moves the entire Mac operating system to a 64-bit architecture. Mac users may feel a bit ho-hum about this. After all, we have enjoyed 64-bit processors since the G5 line of PowerPC Macs. However, while the G5 processor used a 64-bit architecture, its RAM space was limited to 4 TB (terabytes), a 42-bit RAM bus. The existing operating systems, Tiger and Leopard, used a 32-bit kernel and drivers, although they did support 64-bit processes.

Apple on Monday outlined plans for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server, a full 64-bit UNIX server operating system based on open standards that is up to twice as fast as its predecessor. It will be priced at $499 with unlimited client licensing when it ships in September 2009.

I have reviewed every way possible to install Windows 7 Release Candidate x64 on a Mac. The posts are as follows:

The final in contestant in the round up of Virtualization software for the Mac is VMware Fusion.  I have done two reviews already on the free Sun Virtual Box, and Parallels Desktop. I figured I should make this a three part series and evaluate all of them with a clear winner (for my purposes) in the end.  The install was the same scenario…Windows 7 RC x64 on a Mac Pro.

Parallels is yet another virtualization solution for the OS X operating system. I already installed Windows 7 RC x64 using Sun’s Virtual Box and it was somewhat of a tricky/cumbersome experience….read here. I figured why not try to do the same install using Parallels Desktop version 4…Build 4.0.3844 to be exact.

Windows 7 RC has been out for a while now.  It is one of the best Windows operating systems I have ever used and thus I wanted to give it a shot as a Virtual Machine on my Mac Pro using Sun’s FREE Virtual Box software. There are multiple solutions in the market for running virtual machines on a Mac (VMWARE, Parallels, etc) but free is free and thus that is what I chose to try my installation.

Last week we published Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.6 benchmarks where we compared the performance of these two popular operating systems on a Mac Mini. With the OS X kernel currently being 32-bit but with support for 64-bit applications, we had used the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04.

This post is a follow up to my post from this past week about Windows 7 in-place upgrades being a bad idea. Click here for the first part of this two part epic. The second part focuses on completely rebuilding my Mac Pro Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 RC x64.

Windows 7 is the latest and greatest Windows version ever, it should be a child’s play to install? Probably, if you’re not installing it on a slightly outdated but still lovely Mac Book PRO.

As expected, Apple on Wednesday evening provided its vast developer community with a new pre-release distribution of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and asked that they focus attention on 64-bit compatibility in their third party kernel extensions.