How is Mac OS memory handling different from Windows?

How is Mac OS memory handling different from Windows? I recently switched to a Mac, and have a laptop with 4GB of ram. When I look in the prosess explorer, I can see that almost all the memory is used, there is only a few hundred MB left. But almost 2GB is said to be "Inactive".
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bert [Entry]

"Usually all available memory is put to use by the operating system as disk cache. What is already in memory doesn't need to be loaded from disk. When a program requests memory then necessarily the cache gets smaller.

The Windows Task Manager doesn't show this part of memory as ""used"" in contrast to the one in OS X. But they both do essentially the same thing there."