Adding RAM

Hey,

I recently bought myself an old imac g3 for christmas,
700mhz, 384mb, 40gb hd, cdrw,
its my first mac,
and i really love it,
And i will be upgrading from mac os 9 to os x jaguar,
And im wondering how much ram i should add.
I mostly use aol, itunes, yahoo, limewire, i have my mp3 player, webcam, all that junk,
nothing too heavy,
But i do a lot of times, use all of those programs at the same time,
which seems to be something that is hard for my old mac to handle although the only problems ive had is when mac os 9 freezes when im doing a lot of things at once. espically when im downloading a song and browsing the internet at the same time,
its a daunting task with dial up.
Anyway,
i really want jaguar to run a lot better than os 9,
So how much ram should i add?
How much of a difference would it make if i went from 314mb to 768mb?
I think im just going to buy a stick of 512 and keep my 256 in as well,
would that make a big difference?

Or should i just take it to 1gig?
I dont want to spend more than $70,
a typical 512 stick costs about $35-50 on ebay these days,
but if its a big differences between 768mb and 1gb,
than i may shell out some more money.
Also i dont know if this helps but i think that i may run virtual pc for mac 7,
i heard thats a demanding program,
i would use windows 2000 pro.

Thanks,
Tanner

With regards to older, G3 machines running OS X... always buy the most RAM you can afford or the most RAM that the machine will take, whichever comes first.

I find that Panther runs the best on G3 iMacs and can be found pretty cheap on eBay.

I've now got Tiger on my G3 400Mhz with 640mb RAM (and it has been donated to my sister) and it is certainly usable for everyday tasks and running iTunes/MS Word/Internet (camino) all at once.