Ubuntu :: 10.04 - Browsing Hangs - But Everything Works - Did Not Happen On 9.10

Its on an older laptop, a Toshiba Sattelite M50-252. A friend of mine had this laying around, and it wasn't running windows very well. So I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it and it was performing decently enough for browsing and mailing.

On Ubuntu 9.10 there was a problem sending large images for printing. It would make the printer (A brother HL-4050 CDN, placed on the network) say out-of-memory. Same print job from windows would not make this error. Upgrading the system to Ubuntu 10.04 worked.

Actually, I had before tried 10.04 on the machine but ended up formatting and reinstalling 9.10. This was because browsing on 10.04, no matter what browser, would simply hang randomly. A search on google could be performed, and some pages loaded. But some pages didn't load at all or only a few % of them, and the browser would just claim to be "resolving host".

On 9.10, on all 3 installs i've done on the machine, this problem was NOT to be found.

Here goes the real issue: 4 days ago I installed 10.04 to test again(6 months after its release, lots of updates has been done), and browsing worked great. The laptop has been used a lot since then and now yesterday it started stalling again. The most interesting thing is that APT-GET works fine. New software downloads with a snap. Also WGET with a single file works (although it seems to hang at the resolve once in a while).

Why on earth did it suddenly start to behave like this? Nobody with even the knowledge of using SUDO has been using the machine and it has been used ONLY for browsing. Automatic updates are disabled as well. Even weirder, this happens both using the wireless network card and cable.

I have no idea whats going on. Ubuntu 9.10 works always. 10.04 worked the second time (after a few months of updates) but started stalling after a few days. The system itself runs perfectly well, and there is nothing wrong with apt-get and so on as i said.