So it would seem triple-booting Vista, XP, and Ubuntu isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. If you’re not a technologically-oriented person (or if you get bored after reading three paragraphs), you’d better give this post a wide berth. Also note that this is not really a tutorial. I simply stumbled through this situation all on my own and take no responsibility for the pain you might feel when you nuke your computer and hit your head repeatedly on the keyboard because you did what I did.
All right, so, because I’m a geek, I decided to take it upon myself to put not one, not two, but three operating systems on my laptop. It started when I got a new hard drive and completely wiped all the Dell crap off of it so I could install Vista and Ubuntu. I couldn’t do this before because I had some weird partitioning going on with my hard drive due to the presence of Dell MediaDirect. As such, I couldn’t make enough partitions (one primary for the OS and one extended/logical for swap space) to put Linux on. After nuking MediaDirect, I was able to get things started. This was easy. Vista was already installed, so all I had to do was make some space and pop in the Ubuntu Live CD. It installed GRUB (the Linux bootloader), which automatically picked up Vista and let me boot to it just fine.