Thank you Thomas - this is exactly the kind of insight that I was looking for.
If you were to sell your XV, would you then lose the ability to use the synths that you currently have in your setup? If so, I say hold on to your present hardware. If you will really never use it again, then I would say ditch it.
I must admit that I would miss the XV as it's offered brilliant performance and stability, though the downside is the tell-tale quality of the ROM samples - both native to the instrument and on the expansions. When I first owned it the sounds were to die for, though having since used high-quality PC-based soft-samples then the XV has been relegated to background fills (etc). It's still very useful in that respect and I may just hang on to it for a while yet - at-least until I'm satisfied that I have enough soft-samples to keep me going, though I anticipate that to sell it would free up significant revenue to fund PC-based expansion.
Why are you considering more than one computer? Machines now are so powerful you might be able to get by with just one box.
I currently have two boot drives on my P4 3GHz machine, with one SATA drive dedicated to music creation with Project 5v2, Sonar 4, and Kompact/Kontakt (virtual instrument for Eastwest Quantum Leap "RA" - 72 instruments totalling over 14Gb of samples). Currently I intend to complement this at-least with Eastwest's Stormdrum and Symphonic Orchestra Gold, and no-doubt other equally-large sample sets. However, Eastwest for example recommend a minimum of four high-end PC's to take advantage of all features in the Platinum version of their Symphonic Orchestra for rich orchestrations, so I'm thinking that I'll need at-least another computer for what I have in-mind as I'm stereo-only at the moment.
Now Kontakt's "Direct-From-Disk extension works extremely well in buffering selected (huge) samples in real-time from disk and therefore the 4Gb memory limit with the 32-bit XP is quite sufficient, so the issue is more about the processing overhead (reverb, compression, etc). Furthermore, if I wanted to throw in a Z3TA-or-two, along with a few other resource-hungry synths with polyphony, then the poor ol' CPU would probably start to incandesce! This is just an ASIO thing as much as CPU power, so I'm thinking in terms of at-least an additional PC to share the load, both by CPU and sound card. I could then either premix the tracks from the second box and stream into the first (primary) box via SPDIF (for example) to preserve S/N. I would also have the option of effects-processing independent channels on the second box or doing this on the primary box, based on use/resources and overall convenience.
If you turn a computer on, what more would you like to happen besides the operating system loading itself? If you would like programs to automatically run at startup, you can drop shortcuts in the "Startup" folder in the Start menu.
Yes, this has recently occurred to me. You can pre-configure Kompakt with a maximum of eight separate MIDI channels to control loaded samples/elements separately in a single instance of the Kompakt virtual instrument. Furthermore, Kompakt can be run as a stand-alone so that all I should need to do is pre-configure it (effectively as a bank) with the necessary samples and just save the configuration to reflect what it's for (either the name of the song or generic template - such as "Orchestral Strings" for example). There's probably a way of calling Kompakt, complete with a named configuration, from the Windows Start-Up group although a KVM would add minimal inconvenience to do this manually from startup. Once started then it would simply be a case of piping MIDI messages from the primary PC to the second.
The alternative to this would be to either (a) open up Project 5 with separate pre-configured VI's on each track, or (b) to do a similar thing in Sonar with the VI's on separate audio channels complimented by associated MIDI channels to route control messages to the VI's on the audio tracks. Either way, not quite as straightforward as just opening a standalone Kompakt engine but obviously more flexible and still easily configurable.
MS has its problems, but in all honesty, Windows XP is a pretty amazing platform. I don't mean to sound like an MS fanboy, but they really did a nice job making a stable, easy to use, and affordable OS. At present, your best bets are Mac and Windows.
I'll admit that this was probably a case of "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" on my part. I haven't tried Linux or Mac, though all I've had to go on is the way that others rave about these alternatives to M$ and PC's. XP is certainly very good but I think it's very bloated with multimedia and security features that may be desirable to kill off to preserve system resources, and then there's the registry edits to kill off those stupid info bubbles with poppy noises that drive me to distraction. However, I hear what you are saying so I'll stick with M$ XP-Pro for now in the hope that Linux will eventually be sufficiently polished for the PC - the most inexpensive of hardware platforms
Thank you again.
Brendan.