Suggestions for DV use for extra machine anyone?

[sleazy_frank]

Hi all - I built my own machine a couple of years ago; it's got a Duron 1.2ghz chip, 256mb I think, a couple of 8GB drives, a CD drive and a cd rw, networked, XP and a blown 64mb video card (A result of too much video card swapping.).

A little later I bought a new machine (See the specs on my profile), took out the 64mb ATI card and replaced it with the VIVO GF4. This is all very swanky, but the old machine is just sitting there now. Although a noob, I'm getting heavily into the dv and dvd scene and as we all know, MPEG2-ing and the like takes a lot of time and crunching, like when using TMP2ENC and stuff. Can anyone suggest a good way of setting up the old machine to help out in this? Networking and stuff is not my speciality but any help or ideas would be great! Thanks

frank

[FOO]

Just run the encoder on the second machine and
have it encode a (shared) file on the first machine.
Network bandwidth wont be much.

[sleazy_frank]

Ok thanks - will I still have to leave it to it or would I be able to do other tasks? Multitasking whilst encoding or other big number crunching tasks can case trip ups or errors half way through - or so I have read.

thanks for help!

frank