How to gauge available RAM in Vista?

Sorry if this has already been discussed--I tried to search for the topic but...

I usually run Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop CS3("900"mb), Photomechanic (256mb), and Firefox 2.0 on a Dell M1330 2.2GHZ with 2GB RAM.

I would like to see how much RAM is available when these programs are loaded into memory. Vista task manager doesn't show available memory.

However, I see the Resource manager has two types of available memory lists:

"Commit" and "Private"

What are these and is "private" what the program is actually using?

Thanks.

 

Did you check Task Manager -> Performance-> Physical Memory -> Free?

 

If you use the Sidebar, you might check out All CPU Meter as it will show you both Memory and CPU usage.

 

The available RAM in vista task manager is not a true measure, since some portion of the RAM is already cached.

 

Your vista RAM is always all cached and it will free it on-demand.

3GB is optimal for photoshop though. I'm sure you'd see some improvement

 

I had a look at Resource Manager. I clicked on the Memory drop down menu and I saw a nice breakdown of each application and process running within Vista and how much memory each program was using.

The last time I saw an OS give this type of detailed memory information was on OSX.

 

Here's a link that explains what all the columns mean with in Task Manager.

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/e4598b92-b1c1-bc52-5e30-6871dcc59ca01033.mspx

(Memory - Commit Size)
Explanation: Amount of virtual memory that is reserved for use by a process.

(Memory - Private Working Set)
Explanation: Subset of working set that specifically describes the amount of memory a process is using that cannot be shared by other processes.