Advice on upgrading HDD and OS simultaneously

Hey Everybody,
I have decided to boost my MBP 13" (mid-2010) by upgrading the RAM and HDD. I also want to upgrade the OS from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion.

I have done some research and I am confident executing the upgrades. My question has to do with the order of things.

Is it preferable to upgrade the OS before upgrading the hardware, or would it be better to upgrade the hardware and then upgrade the OS?

I am currently running OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) on a MBP 13" (mid-2010) factory setup. I do regular Time Machine backups. I will be upgrading RAM from 4GB to 8GB and upgrading the HDD from 250GB to 1TB.

My current thought is to take the following steps:
1 - fresh back-up
2 - upgrade RAM (verify installation)
3 - upgrade HDD
4 - do clean install of OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
5 - install programs and files from TM backup
(will I encounter problems installing files and programs from a Snow Leopard backup onto the new Mountain Lion OS? In other words, can I perform a TM backup with one OS and install the files to a new OS?)

If this is problematic, then I'm wondering if I should just do the OS upgrade first, do a fresh TM backup, and then move to the hardware upgrades.

Any helpful advice or guidance is appreciated. Again, I've found (what appear to be) solid tutorials on the OS and hardware upgrades so I'm not looking for technical advice regarding those...just the best order in which to execute the upgrades. In the end, I would basically like to have a clean install of Mountain Lion along with my existing programs and files.

Thanks in advance!

niteflyr said:

That's how I would do it!

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Thanks for the affirmation. Can you confirm that there are no issues installing programs and files from a TM backup while running Snow Leopard back to the machine after Mountain Lion is installed?

niteflyr said:

That's exactly how I did it with no issues. After installing ML, setup assistant will go through importing from TM and update the programs. If you bought a new computer today with ML already installed, you would go through the same process in setup assistant whether you imported from TM or an older computer.

Click to expand...

Thanks again for the input...I believe I will proceed with my original idea and post back here if I encounter any issues.