Actually, you can tame the vista resource appetite a bit by going here:
http://www.blackviper.com/ and follow the directions for slimming vista'a hunger to a more manageable level.
After tweaking vista, it's down to about half that to 1 gig. It's just a matter of turning off a bunch of junk the Bill Gates and company set to run automatically, that they thought you should have running, and some of things that were running were applications that I have never used, even the carry-over apps from previous versions of windows. So by turning a bunch of crap off, I noew have a good running rig that loads quick, and doesn't have as many if any issues like it did before.