Well unfortunely things did not go as planned and I have decided to move back to Ubuntu for the mean time. This is due to the fact that I go back to university at the end of this week and I need my laptop ready to get back into action.
My Gentoo installation seemed to work but when I booted into my newly compiled kernel it panicked. It was unable to load my SATA drive to /dev/sda*, which meant I was unable to load anything. Strangely the livecd worked without any issues. If anyone knows why this is occurring I would appreciate that you leave a comment. I am guessing its something to do with the driver modules not being loaded but unfortunately I do not have enough time to work out why. I will give Gentoo another go as soon as time permits.
With regards to moving to console this will still be the case. I will install Ubuntu and disable the autostart of the graphical user interface. I am lucky that through the countless times trying and installing Gentoo and Ubuntu I didn’t accidentally destroy my Windows Vista partition.