My computer operates with 2GM mem, 2 WD Raptor HD's and a Pentium 4 proc. Can I expect a performance boost by increasing the mem to 4GB? Software used: Office 2003 and Corel Draw, Photoshop and Painter.

Any increase in Memory will give a performance boost. How much of a boost will really depend upon what applications are running at the time. Corel Draw and Photoshop, for example, are two very memory intensive applications.
John Barnett MVP Associate Expert Windows - Shell/User
Web: xphelpandsupport.mvps.org Web: vistasupport.mvps.org
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"James"

"James"

Increasing memory often helps with Windows Vista, but it isn't some kind of magical secret performance button that always works no matter what, or else you'd see people with 800Mhz Pentium IIIs with 4Gb of ram administering benchmark smackdowns to people with 3.8Ghz Pentium 4s and only 512mb of ram.
If you are short of memory, that is, if performance monitor shows a high instance of stuff being paged to disk from ram and then back again then you might see an improvement because adding more memory obviously helps if you need more memory. If your performance problem is your graphics card being a bit slow, or your processor being a bit slow or even the processor / memory frequency being too low then adding more memory won't help.
The best route to good performance is to assemble a "well-balanced" computer, to ensure all the components are good ones which allow all the other components to work to their best potential (and it sounds like that is what you're trying to do from your spec above, I'm not criticizing here!).
As John notes, you are using packages that tend to ask for a lot of memory, but then you actually have a reasonable amount of memory. If you had a lower amount of memory, e.g. 512Mb or 1Gb, I would certainly suggesting just adding more, but in the position you describe I'd take the time to properly investigate any performance issues you feel you have before rushing out to buy anything.
Robert Moir rhymeswithgeek.com

It really depends on how big of files you are using. In Photoshop, with a small 64k GIF, I can get by with 1 GB of RAM. But, with larger files, or with video, even 2 GB isn't enough.
You will notice a performance boost by upgrading, but it may not be as big of a boost as you are hoping for. If you do use large files, it can be a huge difference when manipulating those files.
Dustin Harper dharper vistarip.com vistarip.com
"James"