Simply Maya User Community - Maya PLE user ready to dive into Comlete/Unlimited

Hi all, a long time lurker ready to get his feet wet here.
So here's my deal. I've been fiddling around with Maya PLE 4.5 for some time now and am happy to report that in about month's time I will finally get acquainted with an academic version of Maya complete, that I get to take home for practice and a chance to use Unlimited at a place of education. Long story short, I am just barely familiar with network rendering and have had only a few chances to render in MR. My question to you people here is the following: I have two machines at home, both based on AMD Athlon XP that I will be able to use for rendering. Am I going to be able to set this up to use both machines for rendering jobs and how. Do I need a separate (standalone) license for MR on two machines, what are the limitations and how does it all work. I'm going to use it strictly for educational purposes and no commercial work (yet) will be done, so I don't know if it makes any difference in the set-up or not.
I would like to learn how to do this so I'm ready when the almighty software rolls in.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you all very much!