Posts Tagged ‘64-Bit’

Boot Your Mac to 64-Bit Automatically

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Apple made two decisions when launching Snow Leopard this fall. One was to make the entire kernel 64-bit, and the other was to have it default boot to 32-bit mode. I’m not quite sure why they did this, especially with their new line of macs having at least 4GB and in some cases up to 16GB. I always want my machine booting to 64-bit so I can take advantage of the extra memory and because I’m starting to use more and more 64-bit applications.

There has been the much documented solution to hold the “6″ and “4″ buttons down at boot-up, but since I reboot quite often and turn my machines off at night, I’d like an automatic solution. The best solution I found after doing a lot of Googling around was to edit a small file found in

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

In this folder look for the file named

com.apple.Boot.plist

Edit this file in a programming editor such as TextMate or Script Editor. The file by default should look like the following:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>
</dict>
</plist>

Change the 6th line to the following new entry so it appear as follows:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=x86_64</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Now you can reboot you Mac and it will automatically boot into 64-bit mode. If you have a better or different solution to this please post it in the comments.

Tags: 64-Bit, Hacks, Mac, OSX
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