Hello all,
First time poster and slightly new to the Mac world so go easy on me.
I recently just installed Windows 7 (via Boot Camp) on my Macbook Pro not realizing that it was 32 bit (I'm a college student so I was only given the ISO file from our Systems Admin). I paid 400 dollars for an upgrade to 8gb memory when I bought this laptop and now I've learned that I can only access half of that on my Windows partition (if this is incorrect please let me know). The Windows partition was meant to be for mostly gaming and I realize that 4 gb of RAM would probably suffice for now, but in the future, who knows? The point is, I paid a lot of money for double the amount of standard RAM and now its gone to waste.
So after learning all of this, I start to wonder about my Snow Leopard OS. As with most people, my OS X is 32 bit (which I'm told is capable of booting in 64 bit mode). I do some research and find out that Snow Leopard still runs the capable applications in 64 bit. My question(s) is this: If a 32 bit Snow Leopard OS can only access approximately 4gb of RAM, why would Apple offer more RAM than its OS can use? Also, if I decide to do some gaming within my OS X partition, will they be run in 64 (using the full amount of RAM) or 32 bit (I'm sure it depends on the software but I guess my question is: IF the game is capable of running at 64 bit, will Snow Leopard make sure that it does?).
I have a few more questions regarding similar problems I'm having but I guess we'll start with these first. Once again I'm very new to all of this. Thanks in advance for anyone willing to help. (And sorry for the slightly long post).
First time poster and slightly new to the Mac world so go easy on me.
I recently just installed Windows 7 (via Boot Camp) on my Macbook Pro not realizing that it was 32 bit (I'm a college student so I was only given the ISO file from our Systems Admin). I paid 400 dollars for an upgrade to 8gb memory when I bought this laptop and now I've learned that I can only access half of that on my Windows partition (if this is incorrect please let me know). The Windows partition was meant to be for mostly gaming and I realize that 4 gb of RAM would probably suffice for now, but in the future, who knows? The point is, I paid a lot of money for double the amount of standard RAM and now its gone to waste.
So after learning all of this, I start to wonder about my Snow Leopard OS. As with most people, my OS X is 32 bit (which I'm told is capable of booting in 64 bit mode). I do some research and find out that Snow Leopard still runs the capable applications in 64 bit. My question(s) is this: If a 32 bit Snow Leopard OS can only access approximately 4gb of RAM, why would Apple offer more RAM than its OS can use? Also, if I decide to do some gaming within my OS X partition, will they be run in 64 (using the full amount of RAM) or 32 bit (I'm sure it depends on the software but I guess my question is: IF the game is capable of running at 64 bit, will Snow Leopard make sure that it does?).
I have a few more questions regarding similar problems I'm having but I guess we'll start with these first. Once again I'm very new to all of this. Thanks in advance for anyone willing to help. (And sorry for the slightly long post).