Speeding up WP

Hi, everybody.
I’ve just installed WP 1.2 and I am really impressed by it’s feautures, altough it’s toooo slow on my server. I think I know why now:
My WP runs on my _old_ Pentium-166 48 Mb. It’s quite good with static HTML pages and even light php/mysqp apps.
But, as I say, it’s very, very slow with WP 1.2 (about 45 seconds to show a page on my private 100Mbit LAN, altough WP shows it renders the content in only 1 or 2 seconds.)
I’ve discovered that when I switch off my Internet connection (“ifconfig eth1 down”) it takes even more time (minutes!) to display blog’s index (new installation with only 2 posts, as I say). It seems to be pinging or retrieving data from extern Internet websites, and it takes now longer because it waits for a timeout.
As far as I need WP for internal use and for a very few of my friends, I don’t need telling http://www.weblogs.com or other external sites that I’ve updated content, so I have had a look at the code and found external references to  http://gmpg.org/xfn/1, http://purl.org/atom/ns, http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI…
Do you know if it’s possible to disable WP from accessing external sites in order to speed it up. Are you experiencing similar situations?
Greetings and thanks for this masterpiece!