Months ago, I had to "adjust" my MacPro memory in the terminal because Parallels was incompatible with 4GB. Now, it still "sees" only 3 GB. I entered sudo nvram boot-args="" in the terminal and restarted, but it didn't work. How do I regain my lost memory?
Keep in mind that any application under OS X is probably only going to be able to access 3GB or so, because OS X on the Intel systems is not fully 64-bit. I may not be right on that, but I read somewhere that unless the OS is 64-bit, apps can only truly access 3GB. This is why Photoshop can only use up to 3GB (although they have a work-around where it used memory above that for scratch functions).
Do you mean I shouldn't worry about finding my lost GB and anybody with more than 3GB is wasting money on extra memory?
I'm saying that right now, until we have 64-bit OS X (Intel-based), that apps aren't going to be able to address more than 3GB, and even then the apps have to be written to do so. If you go into the Adobe forums, and look into the Photoshop CS3 forum, one of the Adobe developers explained the problems with 64-bit/non 64-bit and 3GB barriers and applications. At this time, Adobe isn't going to go 64-bit, and so Photoshop is still only going to adress 3GB (they have some pseudo-work around to use extra memory as a scratch disk). The decision seemed to be partially they didn't see the majority of users having more than 3GB - 4GB of memory, and partially because Apple didn't have a 64-bit version of Intel-based Tiger/Leopard available. If you have more than 3GB of memory, go into Photoshop and try to give it more - you can't: I don't understand all of the mumbo-jumbo behind the limitations, and I'm only bringing up Photoshop because that's a problem I ran into - on my Mac that I am going to be using Photoshop CS3 on, I have 8GB. I'm not bothered by it, but it caught my eye. Somebody pointed me to this ADC entry on 64-bit Mac OS X (this was about PowerPC G5s):
To follow up, you may find this interesting: Adobe forum thread Adobe forum thread #2 Some quotes from those threads:
