Would extra ram dramatically improve my pc's performance?

I have a AMD xp 2600 with 120gb Hd and 512mb of ram and its sluggish, i've formatted, ran all the antivirus, spyware, defragged and cleaned it all out but its still the same and i have 2-300 mb of ram free when running but i've heard adding more ram will dramatically improve things, will this be so?

Would extra ram dramatically improve my pc's performance?virus removal

You say you've 2-300MB of RAM free, but this is with few programs running. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at the number of processes currently loaded - you'll see anywhere between 35 and 45, which is the norm. However, when you run a game or memory intensive application like a paint package or even bloated Instant Messengers like Yahoo! Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, that free memory pool will drop considerably.

Adding more RAM *will* make a difference generally because when the amount of free physical RAM in your machine drops below a critical level, your computer's swapfile - stored on the HD - will supply additional logical memory. Alas, a HD is considerably slower than physical memory.

Would extra ram dramatically improve my pc's performance?anti virus protection

Yes more ram will increase the performance of your PC. Basically your PC is going to utilize your ram first then once your ram is basically all in use the files start getting written to your hard drive which is called a swap file. Once this process begins your computer's performance is going to become very sluggish because your hard drive is working much harder, doing more process which slows down everything. Also when swap files are written to your HD this is where the majority of the fragmentation occurs.