Well, if you are running Firefox, several things can be done to increase your browsing speed. Running on an ancient machine with a massive processor of 857mHZ, and 32MB of ram, i've often had to look to software solutions to speed things up. First of all, you should try disabling BitDefender when you browse the internet, only to observer the change. Secondly, i would reccomend getting this cracked version of fasterfox, designed to work on firefox 3:
http://www.plunder.com/Fasterfox-for...oad-149537.htm
Also, as your problem may be a slow internet connection, i reccomend DownThemAll for image rich sites. Aside from being quite handy when downloading multiple images, it is a download accelerator, thus making pages like Myspace or Facebook, or any other image rich site, load much faster:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201