Welcome to our forum.
I find it hard to belive that the answer to all of your problems is out there and yet nobody has thought of it yet. We are running about 15 computers at our office half xp and about 5 vistas and a couple windows 98. But by far the best 2 computers we have are APPLE OSX. For a student apple is the only way to go. The more you use an apple the more you hate windows