Wiping HDD and installing Mountain Lion

Hi,
I have an iMac 24" (early 2009) that is running Lion 10.7.5. I have noticed recently that the computer has been running very slow (long login times, applications take ages to open, beach ball appears frequently - even just browsing) - it has been slow for a while, but not this bad. My first question is: would it be better to upgrade the RAM in my computer first? I can get 8GB RAM for £30. Secondly, I keep a Time Machine back up, and I wouldn't mind wiping the HDD to get rid of a lot of clutter. Would it be as simple as wiping the HDD, just booting Lion again, and then I want to upgrade to Mountain Lion, and restore my music and photos again from the Time Machine backup. Or does it not work this way?
Thanks,
Richard.

Upgrading the OS is usually not the answer to a slow system.
How full is your hard drive?  Your profile says 650GB, but how much free space remains?   Performance begins to decline once your drive hits 50% full.  And a  nearly full hard drive will slow down your system to a crawl.  General rule of thumb is to keep at least 20% free, in your case that would be at least 120GB.  That would be the first thing I would check.
Again, general rule of thumb, it's best to have at least 8GB RAM if you are running Lion and especially Mt. Lion.  RAM is relatively cheap right now.  I'd go for it.

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