Ubuntu 13.10 internet very slow “nothing helps” fix

I installed Ubuntu 13.10 on my laptop and went nuts with the laggy laptop. I have 2gb memory on it, which shouldn’t be causing such a comatose experience. I installed drivers, tweaked memory, did a hundred things, nothing helped.

Digging around in the innards, I found that /etc/resolv.conf was very strange and was showing localhost as the name server. This couldn’t be right. Digging around, I found that any attempt to put working DNS servers was getting rewritten.

In the end, I found a strange fix. Network Manager configuration (sudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf)was using dns from dnsmasq. Guessing (rightly as it turns out) that I didn’t need dns served from my computer (and i have no idea how it would sync it), I commented out that line and restarted network manager. It looks like this.

<code>dns=dnsmasq</code>

Commented it out like so

<code>#dns=dnsmasq</code>

Now /etc/resolv.conf is showing the DNS servers it gets from the internet provider.

I have no idea if this is the “right answer”, but if your computer is slow and freezing on using internet, and your /etc/resolv.conf is showing 127.0.1.1 or 127.0.0.1 or something as your dns server instead of proper dns server IPs, it is worth a shot. You can always uncomment it if it doesn’t help.

My computer is running faster, freezing less and hasn’t yet exploded.