I have a Lenovo U330 with a 2GHz dual core processor, 3GB DDR3, and slow as molasses 250GB hard drive. I got fed up with the slow startup, application load, etc. It's even worse when the laptop needs to update itself. So I tossed the hard drive in favor of a 64GB Crucial (economical SSD for homework, music, and web surfing) and installed Win7. Goodness the laptop performs as well as a desktop now.

Since you do some photo editing and whatnot, you might want to opt for an Intel SSD.

Hard drives are a laptops worst enemy generally. That, and video cards/ram.

Hey OP what OS are you running? If you are using 32bit windows then usable memory will only be 3GB even if you upgrade to 4GB. This is because 32bit windows cannot physically map more than 3GB of memory. I learned this the hard way. :)

More appropriately, any 32bit OS cant support more than ~3G of RAM. (And in reality, its actually 4G of memory "total")