Not to mention ease of use, for someone as new as yourself you might want to start of with something that has a graphical installation system, easy to manage package system (although this can be very buggy) and something that you can easily setup your hardware with (again, this can be very buggy).
All in all, everyone suggests Mandriva 10 for new users. I have had terrible luck with it myself, but I have had bad luck with just about any distribution.