William Sommerwerck wrote:
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.




This might be where a Knoppix disk can help arbitrate between a
software/configuration problem and a hardware failure. Any time
I have something fail, I do the "Remove Device"/"Add Device"
dance, then update drivers.

If that fails, out comes the Knoppix disk. If it *still* fails,
it's most likely hardware. I've been lucky so far and nothing
has needed a lot of scrounging for Linux device drivers.

--
Les Cargill