It's ram hungry but that IMHO is a good thing - ram is faster than HDD.
But just as a general point, don't you want the maximum RAM to be available to your applications, not being used by the OS? Addressing RAM also takes a finite time and it you need to do it a lot then it adds up.
Just taken a quick look at UK Dell and they are now supplying all laptops with XP, last time I looked XP was only an option on a minority.