The idea of connecting the two XP machines together to do concurrent audio processing (also called clustering) is not something I have tried, nor is there any Microsoft native support for this (that I know of) so I would not suggest #1 in that way.

#2 might be best if you have a lot of audio scattered all over the drive. To get it all and know you got it all, you pull the drive and drop it into the new one. You will need to set the drive jumper switches appropriately and you should also not put that drive on the same bus as the main drive of the new machine. And its kind of messy in that you are bringing over a lot more than the audio you cared about and not in a good way.

Depending on the applications you have installed on the old drive you may not get them transferred in a running state on the new machine if you simply drop the old drive in to the new box.

This is because the new CPU's drive is the boot source of the OS that you are running on it. You will be booting from the new drive/OS image. So EXEs that you launch that happen to be stored on the old drive can get thrown off if you launch them "into" a different OS environment/install than the one they are expecting. Some apps wont have a problem, some will freak out and refuse to run.

So, as always, it is best to reinstall your tools on the new machine afresh.

Option #1 can happen too, though, and there would be some benefits.

If you simply reinstall all the tools you have onto the new machine from install disks, all you need then is to transfer the audio files and a local network is fine for this. Turn on Sharing for the folder(s) on your old machine where the audio files are and copy them over to the new machine by browsing to the old machine in your Network Neighborhood. If you're lucky, this will be quick and painless. Transfer itself is trivial and pretty fast, the trick is to have the machines find each other and allow sharing.

There are also ways to use the old machine with the new. One thing to try is to "instrumentalize" the old box - host soft snths and samplers on it and play it, using a controller keyboard for example, as an instrument into your mixer and then into yr DAW. Under such a scheme you can even have the DAW control that second box via MIDI.

By offloading the softsynths onto a machine that isnt tasked with also running the DAW, you will increase the maximum plugin and track count on the DAW while you mix.

One thing to discard right away is the idea of hosting your audio on one machine and hosting a DAW on the other, connecting the two using ethernet specifically for that purpose. Maybe firewire would work, but not ethernet or wifi. Too slow for record / read.

-r