In the next couple of days I hope to make a dual boot with ubuntu and win 7. I remember reading somewhere that if you install ubuntu first then win7, will overwrite the grub loader or something along those lines.

Whats the best way to go about this? What would I need to install first?

You can do it either way, really. If you want to install Ubuntu first, check this post over at the official Ubuntu forums out.

Are there any other methods of doing this with Windows 7 installed first? I have an unpartitioned section of my drive waiting for linux but apparently all the tutorials I find online go about it with installing linux prior to win 7.

Try this. Just replace the Fedora information with Ubuntu's.

I went through with that walkthrough last night, Avalith. After *bleep*ing it up the first time and having to rebuild the windows MBR 6 times, I got it going the second run through. Of course like anything once you do it a few times it becomes easy. The second time through took only about 40 minutes until the dual boot was 100% stable.

So far I'm enjoying it, much more than the VM I run with for class on my laptop. I'm figuring once I can find some sound drivers for my HTO Claro Plus+ sound card I'll be able to use it for everything besides encoding and gaming.

Does ALSA not work properly for your sound card or just not recognize and load the right module?

ALSA does indeed work. I had to play around with some settings to get it going. The output was pointed to just analog but I use coax from the sound card to the home theater receiver. As soon as it was switched to digital, my ears were happy again.

As I was testing the audio and video in vlc and kmplayer on linux, playing an mkv file takes on average 10-12% cpu processing power less than on Windows 7, which I though was kinda cool.