How do you do an animated banner that loads fast?
 

I did my first animated banner and its 225x225 pixels, and there are 7 images all together, but its 125kb, which takes too long to load.

Is there any way to make this lighter, or do I have to make the images smaller and maybe use less images?

using photoshop and imageready I assume?

Save all images for web in photoshop (alt+shift+ctrl+s), then run them through imageready and save optimized. I don't know how much smaller it will make it, but it's probably a start :)