My travel netbook is painfully slow

It's taken me 10 minutes to get Gransnet on and get to the right forum.
Before we left the UK my son said I had some thing running in the background and he's taken it off.
But we are away now and running the Internet on a dongle and it's back to being painfully slow.
Could this be the fact I am using a dongle.

Is there anything I can do about it.

I once used one of these clean up programs it didn't seem to make much difference and it got rid of all my history which I wasn't happy about.

Thanks everyone