inalone

You're in luck, since the server is written in Java, we can install it on ARM based devices, including the Pi. Just follow this tutorial.

Being the Linux shill I am, I'll always advocate for switching to Linux if you can, but yes moving to Windows 10 is certainly better than sticking to Windows 7. I recommend finding out how to disable as much telemetry as humanly possible on Windows 10, but if you've been keeping your Windows 7 up to date then the change in telemetry is fairly minimal.

I've always prefered VMWare for Windows-based VMs, but VirtualBox generally has a bit more documentation and such (although I've always found it to lack in performance)

The typical way of doing this would be to shrink your C:/ drive to the size of the SSD, then clone the partition - if the C:/ drive is too small you'd need to start uninstalling programs, deleting files etc. so that it fits. Time wise, shouldn't take too long but depends on the hard drive, SSD and how large the partition you're transferring across is but it shouldn't take that long.

Essentially, your C:/ drive lives on a partition on your hard drive at the moment and if you want to transfer it to an SSD, you'd need to make it so that the partition is able to fit onto the SSD given the SSD's capacity (e.g. if you have a 1TB C:/ drive at the moment (which is where your windows install lives), and only a 250GB SSD, you'd need to make that 1TB partition into a 250GB one).
 
When it comes to cloning software, someone else would have to chip in I'm afraid as I've never done that before, but for shrinking the partition I think Windows' built in Disk Management program is good.
 
EDIT: Shrinking is just the first step though, as a Windows install is typically made up of 3 partitions I think, including the bootloader, so someone else would have to chip in for how to properly transfer the full Windows install across.

ok thanks alot for that.
ill wait for someone to explain what the better software for this is and how to do it.

This is the way I used to like to dual boot - total separation between the two and then just switching between the 2 on boot. Although dual booting on the same drive is more than do-able, a Windows update can totally fuck everything up and I'd say it's generally not worth it unless you're someone like me who likes installing vanilla OSs at least once a month.

I think a Surface Book would be perfectly fine for those tasks - I'm doing CompSci as well and I have a laptop with a dual core i5 which has hyperthreading and it serves me extremely well. I would probably recommend doing a fresh Windows install (or giving Linux a try) if you feel like your Surface Book's snappiness has gone, but I genuinely think it'll be fine. Do you know if the game dev courses will be mostly theoretical or practical, as I know game dev at my uni is mostly about algorithms and vectors and the like rather than Unity programming for example.

Crucial is a known good brand, yes.

Pop_OS is a good shout as a beginner OS as well, I actually really like Pop_OS - probably my favourite Ubuntu derivative. GNOME is nice once you have it configured how you like, I agree. If you have any Linux issues in the future don't be shy to @ me or DM me.