Windows 7 RAM usage

You should have a at least 4GB's of RAM. If your games are RAM intensive you may want to with 8GB's of Ram . (Win 7 64 bit also)

yeah as mentioned you should go for some decent quality 4gb like g skill or corsair or in worst case good quality and cheap ram OCZ platinum.

The amount of RAM required by Windows varies a lot, but you can run it on a lot less than 2GB. I've run windows on a machine with only 768K, and while I didn't try to run much on top of it I didn't have any problems with it.

The real answer to your question is to look at the requirements that are stated for the game itself. They will take the amount of memory used by Widows into account. If the game says that it can run on a 3GB machine, then you should be fine running it with 3GB of RAM. But it still might perform even better with more RAM.

Don't forget that you need to use 64-bit Windows in order to take full advantage of 4GB or more of RAM (although the game itself doesn't need to be 64-bit).

To answer your question - No, the program would have access to more then one gig of RAM on a 3 gig RAM windows 7 system.

In my experience, Windows 7 x64 uses between 800MB and 1.2Gb, tops. 2GB total is a bit light for modern games, but 3GB should be enough, although I'd recommend 4GB for performance reasons (dual-channel functionality). That is unless you get a rig with triple-channel memory.

With 2 x 2GB kits of RAM available for $40 or less, I wouldn't be thinking about 2 or 3 GB of RAM

I agree that 3 gb is quite enough i run games on 2gb for some time and after upgrading to 6gb the frame rate increased for not more than 5 FPS

6GB of low latency 1600 brand name memory cost me $80 and that's didn't include the $10 rebate I never mailed in.

Getting a new computer with under 4GB of ram is being parsimonious.