Restoring on a new hard drive with time machine between leopard/snow leopard

I am about to install a new larger hard drive on my late 2007 MacBook (Going from a full 120GB to a 500GB). My MacBook came with Leopard and I upgraded to Snow Leopard when it came out. I have the original Leopard install disks and the upgrade disk from Snow Leopard. I currently have an external HD connected to my airport extreme and Time Machine is on scheduled backup to this drive over the WiFi.
From what I've read it looks like I cannot use the Leopard startup disk to restore my Snow Leopard created Time Machine backup (I've read it becomes unbootable...). I've read about cloning, which feels a little over my head, so I wondered - Can I install Leopard from the original disk, then upgrade to Snow Leopard with the upgrade disk I have, then restore my Time Machine after that? I assume it would be fastest to restore the Time Machine backup if I have the external connected directly to the USB of the MacBook rather than over the WiFi - yes?
If I can tack on a slight hardware question too - is it worth upgrading from 2 to 4GB of RAM while I'm going to be inside my computer?
Thanks!!!

Partition the drive in GUID format with one Mac OS X data partition.

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