I would suggest using Linux Mint, a very nice modern powerful linux distro which unlike the various *buntu's has a decent interface, the Cinnamon desktop.
Cinnamon is very familiar to people coming from the Windows interface, except done right.
It would be my choice of distro, and I am using an 11-yr-old laptop (Dell Inspiron B130) which came with WinXP... except as it happens I installed Arch Linux, but I am still using Cinnamon.
