ReaWorks

Sorry, that's a bit clannish to follow some company's style guide for English, but I happen to like the company:

Reaper DAW

Not touted on their homepage is probably the coolest and single best reason to get this ($50 for private, noncommercial use although the demo never times out and is fully-functional). Imagine you have a few bits of old networkable technology lying around (laptops, old desktops, whatev) and you're thinking "hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could use these old machines as plugin hosts so I can spare cpu cycles on my main machine?" Yeah, the dream is over. Reaper lets you load plugins and (after you install Reaper and the plugins on the slave machine) start them up on the remote machine, leaving your main CPU ready for handling whatever you want to throw at it. The best reason IMHO to upgrade to gigabit ethernet. Today I purchased a new switch just for this purpose. If your laptops start disappearing to go live at my house, you'll now know why. 802.11b is too slow btw (I know because I tried). 802.11g may work but I haven't tested it yet.