Memory - Available vs Free?
@Tobi Hahn's answer is incorrect. The correct answer should be either Available
or Cached+Free
As suggested by whs in sevenforums.com, Look into Resource Monitor > Memory tab. That gives you a better picture.
Here's my number (with graph):
Hardware Reserved
: Used bye BIOS and driversIn Use
: Ram your programs/OS are usingModified
: Dirty memory, need to write to disk before use.Standby
: Cached data and codeFree
: Free
Also,
Available
: includingStandby
andFree
. =>Standby+Free
Cached
: includingStandby
andModified
=>Standby+Modified
So The answer should be Standby+Free
=> Available
.
Note: If you want to include Modified
, then it would be Modified+Standby+Free
=> Cached+Free
.
Free ram is ram that hasn't been allocated yet. Programs that aren't using ram keep it allocated for later because it's faster to reuse already allocated ram than free ram and reallocate it later. If a new process needs memory but the amount of free ram is low, some of the available memory will be deallocated.