Ubuntu Networking :: Internet Got Extremely Slow On Both Computers?

I have an old HP pavilion laptop (2005) that was useless.I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on it and it became a working computer again. It was excellent, snappy, it was as if I had bought a lower end modern laptop.Internet was working great.I did not have any complaints (in fact, I thought that a modern computer running Ubuntu would beat my so adored macbook, speed wise). For some time I had 2 efficient computer, a macbook and the hp with the Ubuntu OS. So on the last weekend of February, my internet got extremely slow on both computers. After that annoying weekend (February 28) the internet on my mac was good again,however, the internet on my linux continued to be messed up.I tried disabling IPv6 on my machine and on firefox, tried the openDNS, the MTU stuff, but nothing.I even formatted my disk and installed ubuntu again (all this using the installation CD).However, apparently the installation CD uses some of your existing configurations (for example, the layout of the close, minimize,maximize:menu buttons on the corner of windows did not go back to default). So I'm guessing whatever was messed up with the computer didn't change back to default or the previous configuration when I first installed ubuntu. To give you an idea of how slow the internet is, installing alien (terminal installation),I got low speeds of around 150B/s (no typo here, it was bites, not kilo bites) and the fastest around 5,000B/s. The fastest I got was downloading chrome at 6kB/s but that didn't last even a minute. So given that these transfer rates are obtained both on firefox and the terminal, I'm assuming it is not a browsing problem.

A thick headed solution, would probably be to install windows again to get the network configuration to "standard" and then install Ubuntu formatting the disk again (using the CD).I'm using ethernet,so,thinking it might be cable problems, I did try to use the cable that was on my mac on the machine with linux. No success there.