Add RAM or buy a new machine? Need advice please.

Hello,
I am asking this question for a friend who owns a 5 year old iMac. It only has a 500GB hard drive, and it is almost full (475 GB are in use, and we recently had to dump some items because it had reached it's limit). It has the factory-installed 8GB of RAM, but there are two empty slots which can hold 4GB each (or a grand total of 8GB of additional RAM, for a total of 16GB of RAM).
He also is a HUGE user of iTunes, and he has a 1.5 TB external drive that contains all of his iTunes files (we have iTunes set to automatically place all iTunes files onto the external hard drive so that it does not take up hard drive space on the iMac).
He is running OS 10.8, Lion (and wants to upgrade to Mountain Lion).
So, here is my question.....Will adding 8 GB of RAM make this machine "faster"? This machine has gotten very, very slow over the last year. When you launch any application, you get the spinning beach ball for a few minutes and then eventually, sooner or later, the app will come up. But everything moves very slowly----everything.
I was thinking that if we added the 8GB of RAM, that would fix a lot of our slow problems. Am I correct here, or would this not do anything? I was wondering if a 5 year old iMac with 8GB of RAM even has sufficient power to be running Lion in the first place.
Any thoughts on this? Thanks much!

smitty195 wrote:
Will a full hard drive slow down a computer? I was under the impression that it was RAM. This might be very important, because his hard drive is extremely full. Last week, he was getting messages that his hard drive was full, so we took lots of "stuff" out and put it into the trash can and deleted it.
Yes for a couple of reasons. OS X needs plenty of room to move around and work in, plus read and write becomes slower on that part of the hard drives platter.
At this point your friend really needs to backup if he is not already doing so and
1. Farm out his photo's, movies and/or music to an External HD, as per the following article's:
iPhoto '11: Move your iPhoto library to a new location
iMovie '11: Copy or move a project to an external hard disk
iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder
or
2. Have an Apple Authorized Service Provider replace the 500GB Hard Drive with a 1T or larger Hard Drive.

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That seems to be a bad answer for all pre-2008 MacBook users who were used to using the mail function and now can't. I don't need the other features of mountain lion.

Apple has tightened its requirements for this OS upgrade, and some older Macs— even ones that qualified for Lion — won't make the cut for Mountain Lion.
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Jeff, Thanks for the reply. I don't have proof of purchase.. all I kept was the two cd's and the instruction book.I bought it in June of 2008, and don't think I have bank records that far back.I was hoping I could get the information from my installed copy.. there a long number on the bottom rightwhen I open it, but that didn't work and a number etched on the back of the cd... but it too didn't work....
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:55:13 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: I have a new computer am trying to install photoshop elements 5.0 on the new machine need reg-id
    Re: I have a new computer am trying to install photoshop elements 5.0 on the new machine need reg-id
    created by Jeff A Wright in Downloading, Installing, Setting Up - View the full discussion
It is not viewable on your old computer. We may be able to get you a replacement serial number. Do you still have your proof of purchase for Photoshop Elements 5?
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I'm buying a new machine and I have 2 options of Graphics cards

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Hello All,
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sp

Buy your hard drives yourself? skip Apple's over-priced.
ATI is fine and good bargain actually (in Apple kingdom) @ $US200.
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How does 2.26GHz x 8 compare to 3.3GHz x 4?
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Let me put in my 2¢...
I would not buy a Retina machine at this time (seems that you've come to that conclusion, too). Instead, I would go shopping for a refurb mid-2012 non-Retina 15" model. You'll be able to upgrade the RAM to 16GB, install a SSD in it (and SSD prices are falling right now) and it should serve you well for a good 3-5 years. There haven't been any complaints here about that particular model and, although Apple will likely introduce new MacBook Pros this year, I'm sitting on the edge of my wheelchair wondering if the 'open' architecture of the non-Retina models will be in the new line-up (or not).
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What OSX version?
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