I have a Dell INSPIRON 5150 laptop. I don't remember the specs all that well at the moment. I'm just waking up. I *think* its 3.06ghz P4 with 512mb ram. 32mb of the mem are shared with the nvidia video card. 60gig hd.

Any time I run Linux on it, it seems like DNS resolution and webpage loads are slow.

I've run both SuSE and Fedora Core on it.

I have set the machine with static ip addresses and the primary and secondary DNS is pointed directly at my ISP's nameservers. The third is pointed at my router which has two other separate DNS servers defined.

Anyay the Fasterfox Plugin for firefox indicates that it takes about 10 seconds to perform the DNS lookup and then the pages is loaded faster than I can blink.

I do have a firewall running on the box, but I don't think that matters. When I disable it, I get the same results.

If I change the DNS order, I get the same results.

On Windows, Firefox takes 1.51s to load news.google.com and on Linux (laptop) it takes 11.6. 10 whole seconds for DNS lookup! It's starting to drive me crazy. In some cases, it's 20+ seconds just to resolve. Even if I try to ping some address, it takes just as long to resolve.

On the same laptop, I have it dual booted with XP Pro. I have vmware installed on it. If I run linux in vmware, it loads just as fast as windows. For whatever reason, booting directly to linux is where I have the problem.

I've never had this problem with linux on my desktops. Any idea what it could be?
I'm not using wireless at the moment. It happens over both cat5 or 802.11g.