1.You can put many different jobs on a queue and go to sleep. When the one is finished, the next will start automatically. You might even go on vacation and leave the machine render some weeks long :o)

2.If you render to single frames (not flic), you can break the rendering any time you like (Esc), do something else on your computer, then just clean up the "failed" machine in the Network dialog and let it render again - 3DS knows where it stopped and it goes on automatically.

3.You always get a LOG file for every job and you can read how long it took, what the settings were, how much RAM/swap disk it took etc. Plus you can use it as an evidence when doing jobs for other companies that pay per minute rendering time... I use this when benchmarking my newest processor/motherboard/ram configuration. If you render some frames of the same job with each configuration, you get a LOG file that holds the differences for the history of mankind... ;o)

Your computer should work with the default settings that ship with 3DS. You might want to change the Owner's name etc., but the only thing you have to do is click on NetQueue in the Renderer dialog box, give a process name, select "Any" for machines, choose output filename and destination, and then go to Slave mode. The network jobs are saved as .PRJ files in the NETWORK sub-directory. You can load and save them any time if you want to change something in the scene...
I believe the default for Display driver is NONE,you might want to change it to VIBRANT in the 3DSNET.SET, too.