updating a mac

[ianstaunton]

i'm pretty useless with computers so please bear with me! i have an old imac, the kind of 'bubble' one with the coloured plastic at the back. it has a 40gb hard drive 30 of which is full of music. it has 256mb of ram. my question is that somebody told me that if i bought extra ram for the imac and a firewire drive for the music i could wipe the harddrive and install a newer operating system and make the computer last a little longer (i only need it for another 6 months). i was wondering if anybody knows about this kind of thing, price, hassle etc. or if it'd be a better option to buy a new mac.(something WAY out of my buget!) hopefully someone out there can decipher my drivel! cheers.

[cascarelli]

I presume this is the desktop iMac? And youre running OS9? If you wanted to upgrade to OSX then you'd probably need extra space on your drive. The easiest way is probably to add an external hard drive (assuming your iMac has firewire?). When you eventually upgrade the Mac in the future you can always use the external drive as a back up. They probably start at around �60

[snagged]

increase the ram anyway... that'll help when running more than one application at a time...

[fo3nix]

Are you running OS X or OS 9?

Go here for RAM:
http://www.crucial.com/uk/
Just choose Apple and your iMac model, and it should recommend some more RAM. I'm not sure how much your system can be upgraded to.

As for the external drive: if you have a firewire port, then get a firewire drive. If just USB, then try if possible and still get a firewire+USB external drive.