I have 8 gigs of ddr3 ram running at 1066mhz now 1066 is a little slow but with 8 gigs i can have a lot of programs open at one time so it really doesn't matter that the ram runs a little slow.
386MB is still plenty fine for many games at high settings. You just want to take it easy on the high resolution textures and especially the anti-aliasing. Now if your laptop has integrated graphics and not a dedicated GeForce/Radeon, that's another story.
I have 3 gb (used to have 2) on my main Windows 7 computer.
My laptop has 2 GB and my other laptop has 512 MB. My 512 MB works pretty poorly probably because Windows Vista requires more RAM to function properly, even if its Home Basic.
8GB DDR3 here ^^ I had 2GB until recently, 2GB really started to feel cramped (I game a lot and use heavy programs for 3D modeling, photoshop lots of big pictures, video editing, etc) so I decided to jump to win 7 64 bit with 8GB ram.