I had to do a bit of memory shuffling with the two laptops that I have now (I'm buying my friend's Inspiron E1705 and...well, more on that when I feel like doing a comparison between the two laptops, which were built about a year apart from one another) and ultimately wound up with 1GB in my Inspiron 9300 and 2GB in the E1705. Before I booted the 9300 (which is what I'm using now) I was worried that performance in Windows 7 would drop severely.
Man, it feels nice to be proven wrong. This thing runs as good as it did with 2GB. I don't really use this system for much other than web browsing, Office stuff, and playing music (i.e. normal people stuff) but still, I'm running it with the minimum memory requirements for the OS and it's still running great. I still have plenty of RAM available (which means that SuperFetch has it allocated, but it will release the memory without swapping if needed since it's nothing more than prefetch cache), too. I have about 333MB of RAM free with one tab open in Chrome and a Word 2007 document loaded (Chrome is using around 92MB and Word is using about 15MB).
Not sure if I'm even going to bother kicking this system back up to 2GB. As much as I love love love this laptop, it's still five years old, has a single core processor, and a weak graphics chipset. At least the E1705 is enough of a powerhouse to score 4.2 on the Windows Experience thingie, though it has its share of issues of varying severity (more on that when I feel like writing about it).