BlackBerry Pearl its an amazing phone. I used to have a Razr and it was trash compared to the BlackBerry its a solid phone, excellent battery life and a awesome screen.
I have used it and it does a fairly good job. It is alot better than FrontPage and has almost all of the features of Dreamweaver but adds ASP.NET 2.0 support. Its worth it I think.
Its actually a pretty good board, I got one for $25 from newegg and it was probably the best value. I would try for atleast 512mb or 1gb. It will be really nice for kids with that. I don't see that board limiting the performance that much just the RAM.
Most colleges I know of seem to use Visual Studio 2005 or Borland. You should beable to use the free Express Edition of Microsoft Visual C++.NET and just use an Empty Project and add the .cpp source file.
The http://www.asp.net site also has some excellent video tutorials to make your own system if you wanted to, with watching a video and minimal experience it shouldn't be that hard to do. http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/default.aspx?tabid=63
On Windows for development you might want to use XAMPP it installs Apache, PHP, Perl, and MySQL all at once so you don't need to do them separately. I've used it together with Dreamweaver for development before. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
Are you sure that the neighbor isn't hoping onto your wireless network? I've seen it done and its very possible especially if he doesn't have Internet or has slow Internet access.
I've noticed some but nothing too out of the ordinary but with SLI there is no way I could ever fit a soundcard in. You might want to look into the external audigy.