Windows – Good free software to track and graph memory and CPU usage on Windows

Windows Performance Monitor (perfmon) should do the job for you; you can configure it to log to a file, so just enable the counters you need and it'll log as much as you want.

As someone said, with that kind of processor - you really want to add 2-8 GB of memory to both machines - especially as memory is rather cheap right now. If it's laptops there should be room for at least 2 GB - and sometimes 4 or 8 GB (some Dell XPSs can do this for instance).

As others have said, Synergy will let you use them both from a single keyboard and mouse - almost like you had a single computer with dual monitors (though not completely of course).

The network has way too much latency (and bandwidth) for anything useful except for very specialized batchable tasks like compiling or rendering heavy work that doesn't depend on too much data to be transferred.

You could do stuff like run Incredibuild or whatever distributed build environment your developing platform supports - though the limited amount of memory and the fact that it's only two machines will not give you too much gain.

I'd perhaps set one machine up as a continuous build machine that will keep a working build at all times each time you do commits.