Shopping for a new netbook or laptop...

From Digital trends:

SquareTrade is in the business of offering independent warranties to consumers. To produce this data, SquareTrade tracked failure rates for over 30,000 new notebook computers covered by SquareTrade warranty plans. Although that sample set is self-selecting—there’s no way of knowing how representative SquareTrade customers are of everyday computer users—the data does suggest significant variations in reliability among computer manufacturers or significant variations among the way SquareTrade customers select and use different manufacturers’ products.

And industry darling Apple? SquareTrade ranked them number four behind Asus, Toshiba, and Sony, with a two-year failure rate a little over 10 percent and a projected three-year failure rate of 17.4 percent. Above average barely.

I wasn't suggesting that he buy a SquareTrade warrenty. I was only quoting and analysis of the failure rate of laptops that are insured by squaretrade.

He's only going to use this to listen to internet radio, pandora and do some lite surfing. So, there's no need for a lot of processing power and audio quality because less important when listening to compressed streams. Any Netbook will work, just make sure to get one with at least 2GB of RAM. If your going to be listening to streams, then a large and fast hard drive is unimportant and the standard 160GB 5400 RPM drive is more than adequate. I've owned netbooks from HP, MSI and ASUS. I've stuck with the ASUS. Also, I have a fiend that's owned netbooks from HP, Lenovo and Sumsung and ultra-portables from Fujitsu and Sony. The ultra-portables are way over priced for what you use them for. All of the netbooks pretty much use the same hardware so it just comes down to who's name you want on yours.

One thing you might want to consider is getting one with a 11.x" or 12.x" screen; surfing on an 8" or 10" can be a little hard on the eyes. Finally, if you want something with a little more kick, look at the units based on the Ion chipset or the CULV standard. The CULV standard also allows for up to 4GB of RAM.