My advice is to do what I did:
Don't bother with OS3.1 until you can afford to upgrade to 3.5 or 3.9. 3.1 does have a number of bugfixes but they are mainly 'behind the scenes' and you probably won't notice them.
Buying 3.1 and later 3.5/3.9 will probably prove more expensive in the long run as you can often find package deals of 3.5 bundled with the 3.1 ROMS (3.1 comes on the 3.5 CD anyway and there's definitely no point in buying it twice!)
I'm not sure about 3.9 as I don't have it, but I imagine it's the same as with 3.5. Confirmation anyone?
If, as I'm guessing, the real issue is that you don't have a CD Drive, don't worry. Do what I did and transfer everything via a friend's PC linked by a Parallel cable (using PC2Amiga from Aminet).
You will need a reasonably sized HD for this though. I had a 0.5 GB at the time and that was plenty. The only other essential is memory. As always the more the better, but I had 16MB at the time and that was enough. Your accelerator should be okay.
There are plenty of great patches available on Aminet that help get 'low-end' systems like ours running efficiently. I particularly recommend FBlit.
So basically my advice is don't bother with 3.1 now, save your money for 3.5 or 3.9. They are worth it.
