To complement Centurian's comments i would have to say that the distro has to support your hardware out of the box so to speak. If you are a noob you don't want to be messing around with the hardware not until you know what you are doing. It'll only put you off. Then you'll want to return to windoze.
As for me, i run Lycoris on my desktop and my laptop is a little picky so i will be running Mandrake 9 (when its out)since SuSE 7.3 didn't do the job. With that i simply looked at the distro's hardware database and made sure everything was supported.
Incidentally i would recomend
www.lycoris.com as a starter for yourself, its been KISSed (Keep It Short Simple) alot so it may be ideal for you.
Also being a noob stay away from the shit that is Lindows, don't trust it, nobody here as far as i know does either.
Btw i'm new to linux as well so don't get the impression we are all pro's here, just alot of ppl speaking common sense.
