Windows' use of WinSXS and RAM scales with the available capacity. That behavior with WinSXS particularly irks me as it implies acknowledgment that most of those files are unnecessary, yet there's nothing you can do to combat the cancerous tumor that grows in a 128-256gb partition.

I've found 2gb to be perfectly usable with Win7 and 8, Chrome's voracious appetite for memory would be a sticking point, except I've noticed that it does a better job of managing itself when RAM is limited. Chrome runs just fine on 1gb Chromebooks despite having just 768-512mb available most of the time. I will say that the Atom processor is a concern with Chrome even though I know the latest versions are roughly 2-3x more powerful than the Pineview dual core I had in my old Dell netbook. Chrome routinely maxed out the processor on every page load while Firefox and IE never needed more than 25% of the available CPU horsepower. Tripling the available power would eliminate the 5 second lockups I experienced but it could still be a slow, stuttery user experience.