I'm running a Dell Inspiron 1564 with Windows7/Ubuntu dual booting. I haven't logged into the Ubuntu OS partition for some time until recently (trying to force myself into a Linux environment to learn) and when I did, It asked me to upgrade to 12.04 and so I did, restarted and since, everything seems to run extremely slow (startup, opening applications, running applications, switching windows, etc., etc... Another thing is that the Internet cuts out intermittently on my browser. Some pages within my Firefox tabs I can access, some I cant. Almost always while running Skype or some other Internet using application. So I know that I'm getting Internet, I can chat with friends over Skype but certain pages wont load during my Skype calls; the pages just hang upon resfreshing... I can eventually get the page to load after an indefinite amount of waiting and refreshing but this is very annoying.

I am extremely new to Linux so I apologize in advance for my absolute ignorance. I am willing to post whatever information you Linux gurus have me type into the terminal in hopes that you can help me =)

Thanks in advance!