OK, thanks for all the replies.  I guess I'm not far from the point of actually buying the damn BTCs.

"A seed is initially generated and you can restore your wallet from that. You do not have to worry about your HDD failing."

OK, that sounds good, but I don't really understand it.

Given that there's a distinct possibility a HDD could fail, how would BTCs be retrieved from it?  Can I make a written note of my public and private BTC addresses?

Also, can I store the BTCs on an external HDD?  Obviously, that'd be preferable to putting them on a netbook which I'd then have to maintain; given that one has to go online constantly to update software on the netbook, that's not necessarily good for protecting the BTCs.

I am of course assuming the worst case scenarios here; that people are watching my purchase of BTCs and checking my vulnerabilities.

Oh, so Electrum is potentially vulnerable too?  That's just what I wanted to hear!

****!, the only sure way is a paper wallet isn't it?

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.