Upgrade from Snow Leopard or not?

Hi I just made the switch from pc to mac. I bought an early 2008 mac pro 3.1 8 core with 4gb ram. It came with no programs like garage band or Ilife. It has snow leopard installed. Which os is best for me? Should I keep snow leopard and get old versions of programs? Or do I just upgrade to the latest os? Remember I have 0 programs and I'm starting brand new. Some people say I shouldn't upgrade and some say I should. I also read that some of the older macs have trouble running the newest os. Is that true? Thank you for your help.

Presuming you mean this model, I would recommend upping the RAM to at least 8GB (it's a Mac Pro, after all) and running the latest OS, which is El Capitan (OS X 10.11). If you have Snow Leopard installed, update it to 10.6.8 if it isn't there already, then use the Mac App Store (and an Apple ID you'll need to create if you don't already have one -- your iTunes login will work if you already had that) to update to El Cap.

There's no reason not to update a machine that is capable of running El Capitan, it is very fast and will work just fine with that machine. Snow Leopard was great in its day, but it is NO LONGER SAFE TO USE ONLINE. I can't stress this enough -- it hasn't received any updates in years, and more and more programs won't work on it.

With the El Cap install you'll get all the basic programs, though you may need to run the Mac App Store's software update a few times to get everything. Some programs that come standard on new Macs, like iMovie and such, may need to be purchased -- but they are cheap and you can just buy what you need. If you slap some SSDs in there you'll get great performance out of that machine, though of course the newer Macs are waaaay quieter!

Awesome! Thank you. I do plan to upgrade the ram to 8gb in the next few days. should i wait to install the os, or can i do it before i add the ram?

And if you dont mind it being a little bit slow it will run on 4 Gb RAM because I am doing just that on this MBP however my processor is a little faster than yours so the upgrade is a very good idea and you can do it yourself.

Thanks!

Before buying anything double check your specs. There is no 3.1GHz Mac Pro from 2008 or any other year. The Mac Pro 2.1 model 2006-2007 has 3GHz Clovertown processors, and the Mac Pro 3.1 2008 model 3GHz and 3.2Ghz models have Hapertown processors and each uses different memory o the other.

Harry: he didn't mean a 3.1GHz computer, he meant the model identifier: Mac Pro 3,1.

Took me a while to figure that out as well!