Luckily I am a Computer Science student and get Vista almost for free (I think it's about 20bucks). My University also notebooks at a discount. You can buy all of those notebooks for at least 150bucks less if you don't buy the vista license. Unfortunately it fails to install the students version of vista, XP works fine though. But this is not a problem for me because i use Linux almost exclusively.

It is very important to use a language as highlevel as it requires to be. It doesn't make sense to develop a KDE application that reads RSS Feeds in Assembler. In other words it doesn't matter which programming language you choose. you will soon find another language that will fill your needs better. If you are studying Computer Science your should be comfortable to learn a new language in a couple of days. Most of the API's will be unfamiliar but that changes as soon as you get hands on experience.