Recently started to run much slower

I bought a iBook a couple of years ago and it has recently started running much slower. I have mainmenu which repairs the disk permissions and runs the maintence scripts each week.

It's a PPC 1.33 (512 RAM), running Panther and an 80gb hard drive.

The hard drive has about 70gb worth of data on it. itunes in particular is geting much slower (guess its the album covers that cause the problems).

Which bit of my machine is likely to be causing the problems. I figured it was likely to be the RAM. The iBook I've got only has one slot (with 256 built in). Is it worth spending £60 (about $120 dollars) on upgrading my exiting 256 to a 1gb card or is the rest of my system so slow that the upgrade will mkae little difference.

Thanks in advance

it is always worth the money to upgrade the ram.

Seriously it is more then worth it.. also with the slowing down..
I'm very new to mac's but with my regular PC laptop Installing loads out software will obviously slow it down.. due to small files running for everyother application, even when not using them....

so if you have software you dont use.. uninstall it.. you can always reinstall it..

but u got a gud little computer there.. get the most out of it!!!!