It could very likely be a coincidence having nothing to do with the RAM upgrade. Here's something simple and free: download SMART Utility from versiontracker.com. Demo mode is free for a limited time. See if it warns you of imminent hard drive failure.
I know you said the drive is newish, but I've had brand new drives fail with hundreds of bad sectors (blocks) right out of the box. And extreme slowness is one symptom of bad blocks.
A further thought added later: have you tried booting to an external to see if it's slow running under another system? You need to rule out 1. hard drive failure (use SMART Utility for that) and 2. software (booting to another system would do that.)
It could very likely be a coincidence having nothing to do with the RAM upgrade. Here's something simple and free: download SMART Utility from versiontracker.com. Demo mode is free for a limited time. See if it warns you of imminent hard drive failure.
I know you said the drive is newish, but I've had brand new drives fail with hundreds of bad sectors (blocks) right out of the box. And extreme slowness is one symptom of bad blocks.
It could very likely be a coincidence having nothing to do with the RAM upgrade. Here's something simple and free: download SMART Utility from versiontracker.com. Demo mode is free for a limited time. See if it warns you of imminent hard drive failure.