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4GB RAM is plenty of common.

Source: junior enterprise machine on german multinational in a third world country.

It gets worse if you have a retail machine...

There were plenty of Core 2 Quads and Phenom X4's with 4 GB RAM around 2009.

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.