Speeding up/optimising Internet access for a slow connection

Your best bet would be to install Opera and make use of Opera Turbo. Turbo compresses all data so that the amount of data to be transferred reduces.

When Opera Turbo is enabled, webpages are compressed via Opera's servers so that they use much less data than the originals. This means that there is less to download, so you can see your webpages more quickly.

Note: disable Turbo when you're using a Stack Exchange site else you'll get up with not being able to visit the site at all

In addition to @Sathya's answer - to use opera turbo(which probably is the biggest thing),

Updating this, since opera's gone through a lot of flux since then - I've switched to chrome and the data saver extension. We've gotten better internet availability since the original post, but it cuts back my bandwidth usage by ~20 percent or more, so its still a win.

I found a few things helped. Downloads are an utter pain, and rather unreliable. I used wget (which has really reliable download restarts) to download opera and feeddemon - I already had thunderbird.

The secret, it turned out to using slow internet, is to go back to the old way of offline standalone applications - mail clients, and rss feeds, while mostly web based now, seem to work better when you arn't downloading everything at once.

And of course, realistic expections. I'm off youtube till I get home ;p