upgrading a pentium 3 :P

I was thinking of getting my brother a bigger hard drive and more RAM for his computer. He's only got 19GB and 512MB currently. The thing is, would anything I buy work on it?

This is what I had thought of getting:

HD

RAM

There are different types of ram so you need to figure out what his motherboard uses. For the hard drive you need to know if his computer uses SATA or ATA, I believe some hard drives work with both though.

Well I already decided on IDE because I don't even think my old desktop can take SATA. But is that all I need to consider for compatibility?

How do I check what his RAM is? It just says 512MB in 'system'. My bf thinks he'll need SDRAM -.- (which costs a lot more for a lot less).

Connection type like IDE is pretty much the only thing you'll need to worry about for the hard drive. If you take out a stick of his ram it should say on the side of it.

You want to make sure of the pins on the hard drive, ide cable is 40 pin/80 connector, you need to pull the ram out and look at the side of it. Also you need to know if it is dual channel, meaning you need two sticks of the same megs. SDRAM costs more for less but is faster than other types of ram. SD mostly = dual channel.

HI I work w/ computers and honestly its probably not worth it to upgrade, because your going to spend at least a couple hundred just on the parts, and you can buy right now a brand new computer for 200, w/ a 160gb HD and 1 gb of RAM.

but thats just my 2 cents. : P