Memory and other upgrades for photo editing

I live in a relatively large metro area and I have found that many items I order from Amazon are shipped from their local warehouse and, when ordered with "free" Prime 2 day shipping, arrive in 1 day. But it is never clear to me what is available locally and what is not.

Items that I order that are not Prime and are sent with ground shipping sometimes arrive in 1 or 2 days, but sometimes shipping takes as much as 2 weeks.

NewEgg seems to be in California although I don't know where their warehouse might be located. Items I order from places like Adorama or B&H and are shipped gound from the East Coast usually take their full expected shipping time to get to where I live.

Normally I would not care about shipping time for the memory. If I am careful I have no problem operating with the memory I have, but if I am to take advantage of some 50% off sales before the end of the year I need to know if the extra memory will work. Given that, I ordered it with expedited shipping.

I feel relatively sure that the memory will work, given the comments from other owners of this machine model, but I want to be absolutely sure before spending a fair amount of money on software so I don't have to try to get a refund later on. Some places don't refund until they have to and it has taken me as much as (almost) a month to get one processed.

Speeding up my system would be a welcome change but I am never sure of how efficiently the engineers have designed the memory cache algorithms. I have been on more than one project where the "speedup" design changes resulted in a significant slowdown in response due to some unforseen side-effect of the changes. But I will be very happy if the extra memory works and allows me to run multiple processes without the kind of issues I currently have. It is never a good sign when I am tempted to power down the machine in disgust because of how much thrashing is going on trying to do simple things. If I gain speed due to efficient cache-ing, all the better.

As it is now this system, which should be reasonably fast, takes almost 30 seconds to load Word. That seems unreasonable to me, even given Microsoft's somewhat bloated software. Dxo's OP took even longer to load although I have stopped using it since I installed LR4 and PhotoNinja.

I said it before, but I will say it again. I am very grateful to you for all of your suggestions and help.