Running Windows 7 Ent x64 fully patched. I noticed that chrome would take a while to open pages – even pages that I had already visited during the day – and I figured there was a problem with my system.

Windows updates had recently patched the system
McCrappy had been removed in favor of Kaspersky
Chrome had been updated to the latest version
Java/Flash/etc were already all up to date

Long story short, I disabled the Built-in Asynchronous DNS functionality of Chrome and noticed a substantial speed difference (gain).

Open a chrome window
navigate to chrome://flags
Find Built-in Asynchronous DNS (about halfway down the page)
Change to disable, and then restart the browser