Late last night, my internet went down. The router was fine but my ISP were having problems. During this period, I noticed that my Ubuntu 8.04 pretty much ground to a halt. It would take ages to boot up, opening a terminal window would take 30 seconds rather than 1-2 seconds, typing a command in the terminal window would take ages to execute. Opening my home folder would take forever.

Basically everything became ridiculously slow. I know it is related to my internet connection because my ISP has now fixed the issues at the exchange and now Ubuntu is running fine again. I am looking into fixing this in case it ever happens again. Windows doesn't grind to halt just because the internet is down.

Any ideas how to fix this?