very slow drupal 7 in 2 development environments.

I am having a problem with very slow drupal in 2 development environments. Below are the specifics.

Using Drupal 7.12:
PHP Memory 128MB
PHP Execution time 300
Environment: Development (Localhost XAMP and VPS Centos, php 5.3) Tested on both
Only 2 user accounts and one person accessing the development environment.

Added Devel module with these results

http://localhost/specials/ (homepage)
Executed 576 queries in 1829.63 ms. Queries exceeding 5 ms are highlighted. Page execution time was 41094.96 ms. Memory used at: devel_boot()=2.96 MB, devel_shutdown()=45.27 MB, PHP peak=50.75 MB.

http://localhost/specials/people/eduado (Sample page)
Executed 302 queries in 1915.25 ms. Queries exceeding 5 ms are highlighted. Page execution time was 26883.97 ms. Memory used at: devel_boot()=2.56 MB, devel_shutdown()=40.83 MB, PHP peak=44.5 MB.

http://localhost/specials/category/lifestyle (sample page)
Executed 49 queries in 136.24 ms. Queries exceeding 5 ms are highlighted. Page execution time was 18546.71 ms. Memory used at: devel_boot()=3.05 MB, devel_shutdown()=31.9 MB, PHP peak=32.25 MB.

All indicate Execution time is overhead.

Using a profiling module for views. shows same results.

The same kind of response is what I get on a VPS where I transfered the setup

I request for help on how can I find out the cause of the problem and how to solve it.