Use `htop` instead. It displays the information in a bit more verbose way. You'll get each section of "used" memory colour-coded, so that the last yellow area can be ignored as cache.
free does the job of taking cache into account (mentioned in the original post). If you've read the neugierig post, and want a better per-process monitor:
gnome-system-monitor has a top-like monitor as well as graphs, and measures memory properly (including a discount for shared maps); smem works in the console; it doesn't have a term interface like top, but it can be combined with watch.
