Can I save stuff to a external hard drive or just run cd's

i want to burn my cd's into mp3's but not take up my laptop memory. I thought if i bought a external drive my problem would be solved.

What are you asking? Are you asking if you can transfer mp3's to an external? It so, then yes you can. And you can also burn them to a cd, whatever you want to do.

I have burned a lot of music cds to my laptop. Now my laptop runs slower. Could I download, save files, or burn cd to a external drive without it slowing down my laptop. What I really want to know is it worth buying a external drive?

How full is the drive? And also do a defrag before purchasing anything else... If the drive is nearing full it will be slower. And also since there was a lot of data transferred to the drive recently, it needs to be defragmented after that.

Just as dciscouts said; a full hard drive or highly fragmented harddrive tends to run pretty slow. Yes you can add an external drive and save to that,but that doesn't solve your slow laptop problem. Now what you might want to do is add that external hard drive and move as much from the laptop hard drive to the external as you can. This will free space on the laptop hard drive, and hopefully you will see a speed increase. Still defrag, no matter what you decide.