Does adding more RAM give me any performance benefits? If only 3.33GB of my 8GB DDR3 Ram is used, does this mean if I upgrade to 16, I'm doing something useless because it won't be used anyways?
You're not always using 3.33GB of RAM, some days you might use more. However, if you don't get close to using up a lot of your RAM that often you probably don't need to upgrade.
With the limited information given above, I'd say you wouldn't notice an increase in performance upgrading to 16GB of RAM.
Does the fact that 8 diagrams are shown mean I have 8 cores? if not why 8 rectangles?
It means you have 8 logical processors. Observe, the Intel i7: it has 4 cores that support hyperthreading. If HT is enabled, a Task Manager running on an i7 should show 8 graphs by default, one for each logical processor.
Trivia: You can coalesce all 8 graphs into one, if you want to see total CPU usage.
The physical memory tab is saying that only 391 MB is free. The rest of your memory is used. The "3.33 GB" under "Memory" is the commit charge, which is a measure of virtual memory commitments, not physical memory use. – David Schwartz – 2012-03-03T09:03:53.927
You are using the wrong tool. Use Resource Monitor. It is like asking whether you need medical insurance by showing us a snapshot of yourself. – surfasb – 2012-03-03T23:14:51.597
surfasb, Isn't resource monitor just a more detailed version of the same thing? I'm seeing the same values in there too – user893730 – 2012-03-04T02:26:20.803
David, I bought 12 more GB of ram today, it was cheap so I thought whatever, now I have 18GB, and 13GB is free – user893730 – 2012-03-04T02:27:39.957
You can't tell whether you could benefit from more memory by looking at memory usage stats any more than you can tell whether you'd benefit from earning more money by looking at your account balance. Everyone, pretty much, spends about as much as they earn. The question is -- what would they do if they earned more? And to tell that, you have to look at subtler measurements such as paging activity. – David Schwartz – 2012-03-05T02:39:14.547