RAM doesn't make your computer faster. It is best looked at as keeping your computer from getting slower. Does that put it into perspective?
To make it a bit more complicated, when your system runs out of physical memory, the next place your computer looks at is your hard drive to store information. If you want to compare the two, Typical RAM these days will accept data at 6.4+ GB/sec for DDR2 single channel at 200 MHz FSB (800 Mhz real). Compare that to your hard drive that can maybe move data at up to 300 GB/sec (assuming the latest SATA 2 spec), but that is only for the first 8 to 16 MB (HD cache), and with a sustained transfer rate of 30 MB/sec to 50 MB/sec from there on.
So do you want your system RAM to handle all data at 6,400 MB/sec? Or do you want your data to be handled by 50 MB/sec hard drive? That is what you are upgrading for.
At 1 GB, you may not see much swap file activity except in large games, so you probably never hit your hard drive for storage unless you play one of the more recent games made in the past couple years. If you're a gamer, then definitely do the upgrade.
Just my 2 cents.
-S
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