The minimum system specifications should provide acceptable performance (if your expectations aren't too high) with a relatively light workload. It is often possible to run with much less than the specified minimums but this is just a stunt and not suitable for actual usage. Windows update is resource intensive and you can't really do much else while it is happening on a minimum RAM system. Chrome has quite high memory usage when many tabs are open. Tabs on the same website will share a process but separate websites will have their own. This was a design decision to improve stability. The downside is that processes have a relatively high overhead raising the memory requirements. It is probably a poor choice on a low spec system if many tabs will be open.

To get decent performance with a typical workload you need to double the minimum RAM, 2 GB with 32 bits and 4 GB with 64 bits. To get good performance you need to double that again. With 4 GB on 64 bit Windows there will be times of degraded performance due to memory shortages. 8 GB will provide optimum performance in most situations.