Dear Corey Joel,
Definitely adding RAM in your system will surely improve performance of system.
RAM stands for "Random Access Memory" and provides space for microprocessor to read and write data. For example when you copy some data from one place, it is hold by RAM unless you paste it somewhere else. In computer technology terms, this is reading and writing data.
RAM is very much faster than your computer hard disk. Therefore operating system loads the important windows and other softwares files in RAM to work them faster (but keep in mind it can't load all as RAM is expensive than hard disk, low in space and volatile). Therefore if you have more RAM in you PC your programs will work faster and you could open more files and programs simultaneously.
What happens when you have low RAM? OS (we assume you use windows) have a special built in tool which is called VMM (virtual memory manager). This will take data from RAM and store it on hard drive (This process is called swapping out) to free the RAM space and when again needed it will swap in the data from Hard disk to RAM. If we open a large program such as "Adobe photoshop" on low RAM PC. Then VMMÂ has to work a lot of swap in and out hence slowing down the computer. A lot of RAM will surely decrease this process of "swaping out" and "swaping in" and your computer will surely work faster.
Hope to answer the question.
