I believe there are tutorial disks included with XpressPro. I don’t remember XpressPro specifically, but there has always been tutorial diska for both PAL and NTSC with every new Avid I had my hands on.
Disconnect the Medea drives and try to digitize to your internal drive. Also try to import video you digitized with Premiere and see if it is ok both to Medea and internal. I am betting on Medea being a problem. Medea drives are suspect in my book.
The Meridien is never faster than the Meridien no matter what computer you use. But the last releases of Meridien Xpress actually ran extremely slow. The software had serious issues and fixing it was not a priority for Avid. I sent my upgrade back and gave my Meridien away to charity. I replaced it with XpressPro and Mojo. XpressPro will be faster with faster CPUs. Quality is the same or better.