Newly installed ram slows down speed.

I decided to replace the standard 1gb of RAM on my iMac to 4gb recently. I bought 2-2gb sticks (kingston?) to replace the default stick. Ever since, it feels like quite a while longer for the OS to bring me to the login screen. It might just be that I need to do a fresh install but I think I should wait a bit on that.
Here are a few questions I have:
Is the default ram plus one 2gb better for me? (My iMac supports 4 btw)
If I do a fresh install of OSX (10.4) is there a way to salvage my applications without having to reinstall them with all those keys?
I'm not sure, but do you think the ram has anything to do with the message that photoshop gives me telling me that it had to turn off GPU enhancements? (I ask this because I never saw it on CS4 before I got the ram.)

How much longer does it take to start-up?

The extra time may be down to that 4 gig, as the mac first checks the memory space and then begins to cache data in to al that extra memory you have installed

Cannot help you with CS4, I am afraid, haven't used it yet

louishen said:

How much longer does it take to start-up?

The extra time may be down to that 4 gig, as the mac first checks the memory ...

Click to expand...

Exactly what I was going to suggest.

Laguano: When you restart your computer it does a "self-check" of the hardware of sorts...so more ram means a longer "self-check".

But we should be talking something like some extra seconds...not like minutes...so it depends on what you mean by:

"it feels like quite a while longer for the OS to bring me to the login screen."

Also...this should probably only happen on a "restart" of the computer...not if your just "waking?" the computer from "sleep".

- Nick