Hi, I'm a bit of a newb with BTC although I've done a bit of research.

I've decided to use Kraken as the exchange (first on google rank!) and so I guess they must have some credibility.

The bigger question is that of an offline wallet?

According to: https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet, there are 6 to choose from:

Bitcoin Core, Armory, Electrum, mSIGNA, MultiBit, Green Address - all of which have a weakness of some sort.

(My general approach for BTC is to just buy a few and hold them.  If BTC goes global, I'll be happy, if not, and BTC becomes obsolete, no big loss.)

So, let's suppose I chose Electrum, which seems to be one of the easier ones to use.

If I download the wallet to a computer, can I then move the BTCs to an external HDD?  Or, do I have to store them only on the computer?  It's just that I have a netbook I don't use much with Windows 7 starter and thought I could use that.  The question is, what happens if the HDD on the netbook fails, do I lose the BTCs?

I'm also a bit unclear about BTC addresses?  When I buy the the BTCs on Kraken, for example, I have to give an address from my offline wallet?  How is the address generated?

Thanks in advance.