Best/Most user/laptop-friendly distribution?
 

My friend is experiencing an inundation of malware and viruses on his poor old IBM R52 laptop, and even after picking through files, wiping the disk with Darik's Boot and Nuke set on Department of Defense Long Wipe using high-level randomization algorithms, and reinstalling Windows XP, something, somewhere has gotten him again, and now he blames me for installing a 'piece of sh#t' antivirus software, which could be called by its proper name of Avira. I have never had a problem with Avira, and it has a better active firewall than NOD32.

Regardless, I am probably going to strongly encourage to him to install a linux distribution so he hasn't anything to whine about. The problem is that he has virtually no experience using linux. The only experience he has is using dwm on my Arch machines over here, and he still constantly asks questions such as, "What's the command to switch users?", "What's the command to open the dwm menu thing?". I am not disparaging him, he's just not apt with linux, and I couldn't even think of asking him to mount a usb drive on his own or utilize the tar command. He's smart and is quite capable of learning, but has no experience.

To end my tirade, what's the best/most user-friendly distribution that I could install on his IBM R52? I was considering Mint due to its highly out-of-the-box functionality.

Both my kids had Linux Mint on their Dell laptops.Everything worked out of the box.My 11 year old son decided to try Ubuntu Netbook remix and is currently using that problem free.We have also tried Peppermint and that worked fine too.Of course it all depends on the make and model of the laptop but you could try these distros as live cds to see if they run ok.