"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
Using anything shortens its working life.

I can vouch for the remark made but I can give you more details too:

I use smartphones, tablets and laptops to listen to internet radio all
the
time and I've only had one device that suffered because of that. What
happened to that particular device is the WiFi quit working and it
doesn't
even work after a factory reset.

Who knows why the WiFi quit? The radio could have failed simply because
the
chip went bad.

HP has had problems with the radios in some of its notebooks.

Yes, I've heard that and I've even seen one person that no longer has WiFi
on their HP notebook but they claimed it was the switch itself that quit
working so I try not to use the hardware WiFi switch on an HP notebook.

Me, I've had a power plug fail on an HP ZD7000 notebook and that was common
for that particular notebook.

I've also had a DVD fail on an HP DV8000 notebook but when the second DVD
failed too I went back to the first DVD and it has been working fine since
then. I doubt if I'll ever figure that one out unless if it was a problem
with the connector.

Other than that, I've seen a lot of videos on youtube with problematic HPs
where if it isn't the WiFi that goes out it is the video. Case in point:

HP 's Worst Laptop Ever - Pavilion ZD8000 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stqQtQePcM&hd=1

Oddly enough I skipped getting the HP ZD8000 because I went from an HP
ZD7000 to the HP DV8000 where the ZD8000 looks more like the ZD7000 than the
DV8000.

FYI the only device I had that lost the WiFi was a Pharos Traveler 137 that
I got real cheap when a place was getting rid of them so I wasn't too upset
when the WiFi quit on that.
http://www.pharosgps.com/products/proddetail.asp?prod=001_PTL137_8.00

But the video on certain Dell Laptops? Don't get me started.

Rocky