Member Avatar for russey123

Heres something under the task manager and the performance tab. I look at my physical memory and my total is 2037 cached is 1172 and it says i have only 0 free i dont think that is true. But in the memory block it says im using 1.07gb. Doe anyone know why there is such a bug difference. It has me stumped?????

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by jbennet

Dani AI

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Good call by and helpful pointers from and — the numbers in Task Manager are a high‑level summary and can be confusing. To see what Windows is actually holding in RAM (and what it can give back instantly), use the OS tools that report the underlying page lists rather than the aggregated bars.

Open Resource Monitor (type resmon or use the Performance tab -> Resource Monitor) and check the Memory pane. It shows a breakdown (In Use, Modified, Standby, Free) you can act on. For an even deeper breakdown, run Sysinternals RAMMap (download below) — it shows file vs. kernel allocations, which pages are active vs. standby, and has an “Empty Standby List” test so you can observe how much memory is instantly reclaimable.

If the machine feels fine, no change is required — cached pages speed up app launches. If there is actual memory pressure (stuttering, paging, long delays), use Process Explorer or Resource Monitor to find processes with large Working Set / Private Bytes, check for memory leaks or runaway services, disable unnecessary startup items, or add RAM. Emptying standby is only a diagnostic step; doing it regularly will harm performance.

References:

Thanks also to for flagging the confusion — these tools will make the numbers clear.

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Member Avatar for Suspishio

I've explained this in a couple of other threads but it's worth repeating here.

First, your numbers pretty well account for the total available RAM.

Vista treats free RAM as cache for its DLLs and other frequently used code. So it will always report 0 free or maybe up to c. 32MB free depending on what it's doing.

When you lad another application, the cache shrinks and the most unused stuff is wiped out and can be loaded from disk whenever needed. And so on.

All this is good and stuff should run faster than it would with XP.

Member Avatar for jbennet

yup

if it says the total is 2037 and the cached amount is 1172 it really means you are using 865mb.

Member Avatar for Leonle

Oh thanks for this info,I am also confused by it.

Member Avatar for jbennet

caching is good it makes loading common applications and working with data faster

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