SixtyFourSwitcher 1.1

Copyright 2009 Nick Zitzmann.

Did you know that there's a quasi-hidden feature in Snow Leopard that will make your Macintosh run faster across the board at the expense of some backward compatibility? Or are you an Xserve or Mac OS X Server user that has to revert to the older kernel in order to use older software?

SixtyFourSwitcher is a preference pane that makes it easy for users to switch between booting using the 32-bit version of the Mac OS X kernel and the corresponding 64-bit version. Why would anyone want to do this? Because the 64-bit kernel is considerably faster than the 32-bit kernel, with the downside being that it is not compatible with older kernel extensions, and software that relies on the old extensions.

SixtyFourSwitcher requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later. SixtyFourSwitcher is a two-way (Intel 32 and Intel 64) universal binary.

• Fixed a conflict between SixtyFourSwitcher and some other kernel architecture switchers. Since SixtyFourSwitcher works by writing to your Mac's NVRAM rather than modifying the com.apple.Boot property list file, the settings set by other switchers would always override SixtyFourSwitcher. Now SixtyFourSwitcher will clear the kernel architecture setting out of the property list if it is set.

Download SixtyFourSwitcher
Download SixtyFourSwitcher Source Code

Back to Nick's Software Page