My new Toshiba laptop is slow, my e-mail is slow to load

Hi,
I have a new Toshiba Satellite L455-S5975 laptop my son gave me for Christmas and it was fine for a couple of months but now is slow and my e-mail pages take a long time to load.
My OS is Windows 7, I am on a shared network hub with my landlord for internet access, and I use MSN's hotmail e-mail account. I have had a Norton Utilities-Symantec firewall account since I first started using the computer to protect against spyware and viruses.

When I click on an e-mail for instance I get an error message which says:

"The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. Please wait."

Sometimes the wait is 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes it times out and I have to start all over. What is going on? I just did a full system scan and defrag of my PC hard drive last night, and that did nothing to remedy this problem.
Is there something I can do that's simple enough for a non-computer person like me?
My husband says it may be the bandwidth of the network hub which is not in our home but in our neighboring landlord's home. What do you think? Narrow bandwidth?