Has anyone succesfully installed windows 7 on a system with a low amount of ram?

The system requirements from Microsoft about Windows 7 outline a minimum 1 gb for a 32 bit installation.

Does anyone have any advice, tips, success or failure stories about trying to get it running on a older machine that doesn't meet the outlined requirements?

Example cases; would 768mb work but be annoying to use, 512mb be really difficult to install, 256mb not even worth trying?

Windows 7 scale really well to low-end hardware. I have installed Win 7 x32 on a Pentium 4 Celeron 2.2GHz with 384MB memory, and it was perfect for basic tasks like Office, iTunes, Web, etc etc.

Win 7 has been optimized quite thoroughly, and most user experience states that they are pretty impressed with how well performance scales across different hardware.

Give it a shot - any machine within the past 5 years should work well.

There is one reference on Windows Seven 7 Runs Flawlessly on 512MB RAM.
And a 512MB VM installation reference.

Another local question reference -- it is about selecting x32/x64 for a 2GB RAM system though.
Also if you feel interested an Atom 1GB RAM install: Windows 7 - What I saw in 15 minutes

In fact people have done

W7 runs on a P2 with 266MHz CPU, 96MB RAM & 4Mb graphic card ! i have done 3 tests: 2 successfull… 1. 128 MB RAM 2. 96 MB ram

See here Running Windows 7 on a Dinosaur if you don't believe it yourself