How to read how much free memory available in Task Manager?

[tracerit]

I have 3GB of RAM in my laptop and lately i've noticed a slow down due to a memory leak in firefox with google's toolbar as athe culprit.

when i go to Task Manager and Performance I"ll see the following:
Total 3000
Cached 1600
Available 1200
Free 0

That's roughly what I see when I'm experiencing a slow down. Cached, Available, and Free values don't add up to 3000 either. So how do i interpret that? I keep thinking I have 1200MB ram available, but 0 free, it doesn't make sense :/

 

[a123456]

Cached is memory that was recently used but it's not in demand right now. Windows keeps it cached. I think that's pretty much Superfetch.

Free is the amount of memory that's doing absolutely nothing.

Available is the sum of the free and the standby memory.

You should have plenty of memory for stuff. In general, I've found that all browsers tend to leak memory if you leave them open and have to be restarted.

http://brandonlive.com/2010/02/21/measuring-memory-usage-in-windows-7/

 

[Ross Ridge]

Windows will normally use any otherwise unused memory as part of the disk cache. Since Windows will reallocate memory from the cache to processes as they need it, this memory is "available" but technically isn't "free". On my machine, after I've been using it for a while, the Cached and Available numbers are normally about the same, while the Free number is typically close to 0.

 

[dorion]

Your GPU might be using the missing 200MB.

Windows should free up the Cached memory as a leaky Firefox demands more. Do you notice that happening?