He figures he'll know more conclusively what's wrong when whatever piece of hardware that's causing the problems completely fails. THEN, he says, he'll replace it.

Meanwhile, Andrei keeps crashing, John keeps backing him up every other day or so, and John keeps rebuilding whatever he loses in Linux/etc when it happens.

When he's frustrated enough, I'll give him the print-out of your suggestion. :)

Nightowl >8#

Edit: Fixed spelling