4990 Drivers for Snow Leopard

[Ken Lee]

As far as I can tell, the real reason they made the upgrade, had to do with providing support for Microsoft Outlook Exchange - which was a barrier to purchase. They tossed in some optimizations that were probably already in the can.

The only thing I really notice, as mentioned before, is improved speed in graphics rendering, which lets me breeze through thumbnails.

Picasa is now so fast, it's breathtaking. Even Adobe Bridge CS3 is faster. It's as though I had gotten a newer, faster machine altogether, for a comparatively low price.

[gnuyork]

Ken, do you have a mac w/ 64 bit hardware, and if you do are you booting in 64 bit? There's a trick to that that some mac users may not know about. Perhaps it would make for a good tech tip sticky.

I have used a friend's recent macbook pro with snow leopard and the routine tasks really fly, and he didn't know about the booting in 64 bit trick. That experience is one of the reasons I decided to upgrade the OS, but I am not getting the same experience, and I knew I wouldn't, but I thought there would be at least a little improvement.

[Ken Lee]

Oh - I'm not aware of any boot options. I have an iMac, around 1 year old.

Is there some documentation about this ?

[gnuyork]

The trick:

Restart your computer and hold down the 6 and 4 keys until you see your desktop. You should then be running in 64 bit mode. A way to check that is to go to your system profiler and click on software, you should see where it says 64 bit kernel and extensions - it should say yes if you were successfully booted in 64 bit. It would say no if you were not, or your hardware did not support 64 bit, like my older macbook pro.

[Ken Lee]

Gnuyork --

Excellent - That worked !!

Why don't they just enable that automatically ?

By the way, gnuyork is a very clever... gname !

[gnuyork]

Glad it worked for you.

Don't know why that doesn't engage automatically, except maybe because it's needs to be compatible with the non 64 bit hardware intel macs like my macbook pro, so they make it as an option to engage on the capable machines, but I truly don't know.

[Ken Lee]

Whatever it is, I'm most grateful. It seems that some apps may already be compiled for 64-bit. Webkit browser (nightly download) is very fast now. Almost scary fast.

[jim kitchen]

Gentlemen,

For your files...

The reason 64 bit is turned off for the moment, by default, happens to be that several drivers are not prime time ready in the third party world, and setting the default to 64 bit would trouble a few third party suppliers. A few third party kernel extensions are still 32 bit compliant within the Mac world, and tweaking your Mac to become 64 bit compliant throughout the processor chain, will choke the 32 bit kernel extensions. Apple did this for a reason to allow third party developers to apply resources to the peripherals and their applications. One of the issues that any developer must address properly happens to be their application's memory management process, and if the developer did not address 64 bit memory management properly, the application will be a digital paper weight, quickly.

That said, there is no harm in running your Mac with 64 bit, since almost every native application within the Mac is 64 bit compliant, but the 64 bit mode is really a tool for Mac Developers presently, where they must stress test their applications in 64 bit mode, and where this "switch" affects the processor's kernel only, moving the processor's kernel from 32 bit to 64 bit. If you do not have a 64 bit processor, there is nothing you can do now, where the Intel Core Duo is 32 bit, and the Intel Core Duo 2 happens to be 64 bit. Snow Leopard will run in both modes.

Your computer must have a kernel that is EFI compliant for this to work effectively.

If you are having issues with any application, after you tried the 6 and 4 keys during startup, then reboot holding the 3 and 2 keys to bring the Mac to the kernel's original default 32 bit position. Once third party players are all on board with a clean 64 bit kernel process, Apple will probably release a firmware update to set the kernel to 64 bit, compared to the default 32 bit position.

I hope this helps...

jim k

[gnuyork]

Thanks for the clarification, Jim.

[jim kitchen]

Guess what Apple did with the Intel processor's EFI firmware update today...

jim k