Performance - Animated Image Class That Uses Timer To Advance Frames

VB.NET, .NET 4
I am writing an industrial control front-end that has some "fancy" graphics to indicate the states of some machinery. For example, I indicate that some heaters are on by showing red wavy arrows emanating out from a picture of a heater. I accomplished this by creating a class that inherits from PictureBox and using a timer to advance the images:

Public Class AnimatedPictureBox
Inherits PictureBox
Private WithEvents Timer As New Timers.Timer
Public Property Interval As Double
[Code] .....

My question is "Is this an alright way to go about this or is there some obvious better way?" I'm not too good at programming and am worried that having several of these objects with their embedded timers taxing the CPU. I went with animated GIFs for some other animation stuff, but here, I wanted to be able to handle image formats that can handle a larger palette than a GIF (if that makes sense). In other words, when I tried to save some of my animations as GIFs, the image quality took an unacceptable hit.