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I recently purchased a brand-new MacBook Pro. I've never had a Mac before, and many of the programs I use in my "day job" require Windows applications in some form or another. Most games need Windows as well, and while I don't play on a daily basis, I at least wanted the flexibility to use Windows when needed.

Apple has a great utility built-in to Mac OS X called "Boot Camp". Apple lets you install Windows onto your Mac and run all of your applications. I had read about Apple's Boot Camp software which lets you install Windows one one part of your hard drive. It was super easy. Run the Boot Camp utility, follow the instructions, install Windows, add a few drivers, and things were up and running. I'm really liking Windows 7, and since I only had 4GB of RAM in the MacBook Pro, I used a 32-bit version of the operating system.

WRONG CHOICE.

Everything was working great... but as I dug around into the internals of the operating system, something didn't look right. Under the system section of control panel, I saw:

Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (2.18 GB usable)

2.18 usable?!?!? For some reason half of the memory wasn't available Windows. It knew the ram was there, but wasn't able to address it. Now, I know that 32-bit operating systems can access somewhere between 3.5 and 4GB worth of RAM, but 2.18 GB was unacceptable.

I didn't find much out on the internet (thus, this particular post), so I decided to give 64-bit Windows 7 a try.

RIGHT CHOICE.

Much better... Now the situation looks like this:



Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (3.86 GB usable)

So, moral of the story is this... If you don't want to lose access to half your RAM in Boot Camp, use a 64-bit version of Windows.