Do I need to worry much about load on my system while ripping and/or encoding (using EAC and Lame)? I'm not talking about heavy gaming, but normal office/db/coding chores-- it would be nice to get some work done while doing at least one of these, but I don't want to find out a month later that I got a bunch of dropouts or something in my MP3s...

I'm running WinXP on various P4 machines...

For ripping it's one thing, for encoding other.

When ripping, high CPU usage may interrupt it with very rare buggy drives/mainboards.
For encoding it won't matter at all. (no dropouts or anything like that)

Surely EAC wouldn't be adversely affected by that? It should keep re-reading until it gets a good read - unless the machine crashes or something.