Ubuntu is a good start.
There is lots of documentation geared towards new users aviable and the official Ubuntu forums in the past have shown to have been friendly to newbies. IRC channels and all sorts of stuff exist to help out new users.
What is very important is also what are the hardare specifications on your laptop? (cpu speed, ram, chipsets, wireless card chipset, video, etc)
This can make a difference. A lower-end computer with only about 128-256 megs of RAM probably would be better served with Xubuntu, which is based on Ubuntu but uses a lighter desktop (less features, but less ram hungry). Linux is very good on older machines, but the default Gnome or KDE environment is not good on older machines.
For yourself what you want to do is take time to look over the aviable documentation. They have FAQ pages and there are official Wiki and unofficial wikis for Ubuntu that are very usefull. (wikis, of course, are user-editable websites typically used for documentation on Linux projects).
These things hold information on common problems that people run into and standard ways of working around or information that you need to understand what is going on. You don't need to study them like you would if your going to get tested, but just reading through them fast, just glancing, while poking at your system when they say stuff that is interesting is a good way to learn how to use Linux.
That way if somebody says something like 'have you enabled the multiverse repository yet?' you can go 'ahah, I read that somewere' and you know were to go quickly to find the answer.
Otherwise through pure trial and error it can be quite frustrating at times.
haha. it's only 2 years old, so it should be able to handle ubuntu fine.
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