Does RAM speed up your computer? Or should I just get a new hard drive?

RAM speed up your computer but there may be some other issues as well which can help your computer speed improved.Hard drive is nothing to improve speed.Installing free system optimizer can speed up your computer.It can fix all issues slowing down your PC and Internet. Fine-tune your system setting to achieve the maximum performance.

WAKE UP. You are getting popups? And you say you have antivirus, when you really mean VIRUS. And you are still using the machine? You must really want to get your identity stolen,. Or your personal details sent all round the Internet. Including credit card and banking details. Your machine is serio8sly infected with dangerous maware of more than one type. NEVER use an infected machine, FIX IT. Apart form what it is doing to you, it could be infecting thousands of other machines. Selfish. Download the free scanner from http://malwarebytes.org and run the full scan. Quarantine EVERYTHING it finds. Then get yourself a good active anti-virus to prevent further infections. That will probably speed up your machine ore than RAM or anything else/ And fitting SSD drives does not have anywhere near as much effect on performance as everyone seems to believe. From experience, less difference than running the ccleaner registry cleaner from http://piriform.com/...riform.com. And far less than removing malware. On some machines it makes NO difference.

Your pc is probably infected. Maybe you should backup w/e you need onto an external hd and wipe/reformat your pc clean and do a fresh install of windows.

As for the RAM question. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and go to Start Task Manager. Then go to Performance and check how much Memory/Ram you normally use. If you have like 8gb of ram and you're constantly using over 6 or 7 gb of Memory then yeah… You'll probably want the extra RAM.

So if you're like me, who has like Photoshop & Bridge opened with more than a dozen browser tabs and windows opened AND playing fairly recent pc games that have nice graphics… Then you'll probably want more than 8gb of ram.

Adding ram will only help if your running less than 4gb or doing video-editing, high end gaming. Having more ram is like having a larger fuel tank, so you can go further without filling up (swapping to hdd).

any ssd will beat all normal 5/7K rpm hdd's, period. They normally are 5-10 times faster.

BUT
in your case, its the infections that slow you down.
get malwarebytes and do a quick scan, quarantine, reboot and do a full scan, quarantine and reboot. Now use ccleaner to get rid of leftovers, reboot and use the reg-cleaner that comes with it, reboot and install a good antivirus like avast (free) .
make sure to change the settings to HIGH and you will never have to deal with an infection.

A combination of ram and your processor determine your speed. A new hard drive won't really help. Yes it will get rid of extra "baggage' but your ram and your processor have the most affect on speed.

Get an SSD drive to replace your HDD. Without a doubt best upgrade possible.

Adding ram is the first poss. Upgrade. Go to crucial.com and download scanner. It's safe. It will tell you how much ram you currently have and how much your mother board can take. 32bit = 3.5g max ram 64bit much more

Only RAM upgrade your pc and get more performance

Ram only speeds up your computer when it needs more.