Windows memory usage question

[Vir]

Hi,

I've got 4x1GB Crucial Ballistix PC6400 4-4-4-12 and am using Vista 64bit.

Now and then I get the feeling I get a performance drop in games and it's not because of the gfx card.
I did look into the task manager and I noticed that my amount of 'Free' Physical Memory (MB) is around 0, specially when playing WoW or any other game. There is a lot of cached memory and I am wondering, am I at a point that I need to get 6GB or 8GB ram or is this normal? It uses a lot from the page file as well...

I am not totally sure what cached memory does, is it memory that is in use or?

 

[Broken Hope]

Cached memory is basically free memory that the OS is using to speed up other operations, if a game or other application asks for that memory it will be freed without much of a performance drop. The only time you need to upgrade to 6 or 8GB of RAM is if your peak commit charge is often higher than the physical amount of RAM you have installed.

I don't believe it's using a ton of the page file I think Vista just shows PF memory differently under task manager compared to XP.

 

[Vir]

Ok, ye I can't find peak under Task Manager though, I think they removed it in Vista.. :S Ok then I'll just stay with 4GB, strange stuff maybe I need to reinstall my copy.