Should I buy more memory?

I am frequently setting with almost zero free memory, and 750-1GB of inactive memory.
Sometimes I max out the memory entirely (zero free, very low inactive), but that is much rarer.
Will getting more memory do me any good? My machine runs like a dog when I have no free memory, even if there's plenty of inactive memory.

I am definitely aware that Safari is a memory hog, and I close it frequently to clear it out.
I've used iFreeMem before, but it seems like it has slowed my system down more than speeding it up.. I get a lot of beachballs and UI lag after using it.
Anyway, the weirdest part of all this, is the behavior exhibited by this example:
I have zero free memory, and 1GB of inactive memory.
I shut down several applications to free up around 1.5GB total of inactive and free memory.
I start up VMWare which immediately wires/activates 1GB of memory.
I shut down VMWare, and it shows no used memory (other than inactive, of course).
I am now back to having 245MB of free memory and 1.21GB inactive.
It seems like closing out my applications doesn't free memory for other applications to use. As a result, resuming virtual machines can be heinously slow, because it has to free every ounce of memory that it needs to resume.
Will more memory solve this, or will OS X just eat all that up as inactive too?

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