Advise for adding larger internal hard drive & faster processor

After five years it is time to make some upgrades to my G4 Quicksilver 733 MHz Tower. The hard drive is nearly full and the processor doesn't seem as fast as it once did (especially after using my faster PowerBook G4). I want to replace the 40GB hard drive with a 128GB hard drive. What is the best way to transfer the data and information (applications, etc.). Should I add it as a second hard drive and transfer the data that way then remove the original one? Perhaps I should move all my data from an aux hard drive I have. Should I do a clean install of the operating system and then transfer the rest of the data? If you make a second hard drive I guess you have to identify one as a "master" and the original one as the "slave", or should I do it the opposite way? Any advise would be helpful. Also I want to upgrade to a 1.8 duel processor. One person told me I may be disappointed with the results since the speed of the mother board limits the performance of the processor. Is that true? I have already maxed out the RAM so I should be fine there. Any advise to these issues would be most appreciated.

Hi
You could use a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone your existing drive:
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
Alternatively you could just reinstall everything from scratch. I tend to do a reinstall and have a bit of a clean out, only reinstalling those apps etc I still actually use.
I'd have both drives installed internally to do the cloning or transferring of data across after a reinstall. You could then remove the original drive or just leave it for use as a backup disk or temporary storage area etc. With two drives installed, one will need to be set to master and one to slave. With one drive installed, it will need to be set to master. I don't think it really matters which way around you do it.
In terms of processor upgrades, the 133MHz system bus/memory will become a bottleneck at some point, but it partly depends on which applications you're using at the time and whether they're processor bound or bandwidth starved. IMHO there's a sweet spot where you get the most bang for the buck. A higher clocked processor would probably still be faster in real world terms, but I suspect you get diminishing returns for the extra cost involved.
When I upgraded my Quicksilver, I intended to get a single 7455 based processor upgrade from OWC. They're resonably priced and tend to be faster in real world usage than a 7447 based processor upgrade running at the same clock speed due to the extra level 3 cache (which partly helps to offset the limited bus speed). In the end though I managed to get a dual 1GHz processor card pulled from another Quicksilver in OWC's clearance section. The advantages were it's an original Apple part which didn't require any firmware updates, software patches or additional fans etc. The disadvantages were it's a four year old part with a limited warranty and the heat sink had to be reattached using thermal paste etc.
I hope this helps.

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    No
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