Thanks everyone. Feeling good. Husky, grad school rocks! I completely support a stint in grad school if you can make it work. The Real World is so overrated.
So, Windows 7. I know it was very trendy to gripe about Vista but I never really had a problem with it, aside from the speed issues (I had 3x the minimum required RAM and it still froze all the time). 7 fixes it. It's smoking fast. There's some cool stuff on it to play with, too. Everything I didn't like about Vista is gone. So basically it's better, faster, and has more features than Vista.
I have an early class tomorrow, better get to sleep.