Vista does not seem to be reporting correct memory through taskbar

[Anand]

I have 32bit Vista Home Premium on my Dell inspiron with 4 gb of ram, and 128
mb discrete memory graphic card.

The system properties reports the memory as 4gb, while the task manager
reports the total physical memory as 3.5 gb, which is fine since part of the
memory is locked out due to memory addressing of the devices on the computer.

However, the usage statistics of the 3.5gb total physical memory do not seem
to be correct.

Task bar displays:
Physical Memory:
Total : 3581
Cached: 1864
Free: 895

Now my question is: why dont the numbers add up correctly?

Free + Cached != Total memory ..why so?

Where is almost 1 gb of memory disappearing to?

And moreover, the weirdest thing is that in the memory graph the memory
usage is 33% (around 1.16GB) which no where corresponds to the numbers
stated above!


help please!

 

[Mark H]

Total : the amount of RAM installed on your computer, listed in megabytes
(MB).
Cached : the amount of physical memory used recently for system resources.
Free : the amount of memory that is currently unused or does not contain
useful information (unlike cached files, which do contain useful
information).

A cache is not the same as total memory in use. It is memory allocated to
storage of snippets or addresses for quicker access to a function which may
be used by a program.

These numbers represent "recently", not current.
The graph shows, "now."

Add it up this way...
Free + Cached + In Use + Kernel
(Assumming Kernel is probably around 80.)
Just from the numbers you provided + Kernel, I get 4.00 GB.
(But, that's probably over simplified...)