[Dean Roddey]

Actually, if you have a router, the computer is never 'connected to the net' unless it actively goes out and makes connections. It's not exposed in any way to the internet unless it chooses to make such a connection proactively. No one outside your router can make an incoming connection to any machine in your network unless you allow it by setting up a port forward in the router.

It will do some talking to other computers in your network, so there's a little possible danger there, if you allow other systems in your network to become infected, and then pull over stuff from those other systems and run it on your DAW.

But you can pretty easily just disable the TCP/IP connection when you don't want it to be able to connect to anything, without completely removing networking from the system. So that, if you do need to upgrade something, it's just a matter of reenabling the TCP/IP connection again for long enough to do that.

On the resource usage front, you can get the memory usage down significantly by just selectively turning off services, and importantly just dump the XP look and feel service. The machine will go back to a Windows 2000 type of look, but it hardly matters on a DAW, and the resource savings is substantial just from that one thing. There are various web sites that will give you a list of the services that are not really necessary if you don't feel comfortable selecting them yourself.