4 GB RAM seems impossibly tight as well. I'm not sure if 4 core and 4 GB was ever a common or representative setup for PCs; perhaps 2 core and 4 GB in the Vista timeframe...
I'm not sure why you're bringing cores into this. And 2 cores is still fine for a lot of purposes. And there were lots of 2 core machines with far less than 4GB. Even 1GB was "double" the minimum required for Vista, because OEMs pressured microsoft into lowering the vista requirements down to garbage levels.
