Spinning ball and RAM

I use a lot of big programs on my ibook G3(photoshop, Illustrator, Lightwave,etc) so I thought I would upgrade my RAM from 256 to 512 MB. I bought the ram from CompUSA (Canton PC133). My computer did not run faster and instead I was getting the Spinning Beach Ball Of Death trying to open program like Internet Explorer. I never noticed this ball before. So I returned the ram and put my old RAM back in (PC 100). I still the the spinning ball, but I can tell my computer works a little better (noticeable when minimizing pages).
I have repaired permissions and reset parameters, and performed hardware tests. no problems found. What could fix this problem? Would a new hardrive help?
Has anyone else had a similar problem?
I still want to upgrade my RAM. One person suggested trying the PC 100, someone else told me that I should only buy RAM from Apple. Does anyone have any advise? thanks.

I would say the RAM was probably a bit buggy.. although usually you would most likely have been experiencing kernel panics too..


I'd maybe try buying RAM from somewhere like Crucial.com or OWC.com, they seem to be the most reliable when it comes to RAM...

What model iBook do you have? I'm guessing a G3 or early G4 since you say you had 1 module taken up with 256 total)

Maybe go all out and get a total of 768MB ram (if your iBook supports it) and see if that helps...

Exchanging the harddrive is a fairly tricky job and I don't think that's the issue here since those apps are RAM intensive, not hdd intensive (they aren't reading/writing tons of data to the drive, they're calculating stuff)...


Hope this helps!