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.