That's entirely possible, I never bothered to look at the junk IT installed on it. I also used the base Aero interface, which I suspected was a resource hog. I never tried to optimize performance since memory was free.
I also haven't ran XP with less than 2gb of ram since 2005, so I don't know what kind of slowdown xp experiences under resource constraints.
But my perceived performance equilibrium was about 2gb with xp to 6gb with win7.
It sounds like your machine probably wasn't capable of running Aero on whatever IGP it had, more than anything. Aero Basic runs excellently on even really old stuff (and handles screen drawing much more intelligently than XP did, so it feels considerably snappier).
6GB sounds excessive for that situation, but if your IGP is getting testy about system memory, it seems likely that it'd require a hell of a lot to simulate decent behavior.
(Typed on my Toshiba Win7 netbook, with a 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB of RAM, and Aero running without a hitch.)
I also haven't ran XP with less than 2gb of ram since 2005, so I don't know what kind of slowdown xp experiences under resource constraints.
But my perceived performance equilibrium was about 2gb with xp to 6gb with win7.