We used to have a comp in the networking lab, where the HD, (mobo?), and lots of things were replaced, but it would never seem to work. The teacher wanted to paint it black, and put it out on I-40 for an early funeral
OK, all joking aside (not to mention the traffic problems "ran over black laptop, lost control of car" could cause; whatever distro you get, I wouldn't go with a default install. If you're not familiar, you might try a distro such as Fedora or Mandrake. Others no doubt can think of leaner distros for that laptop, though these might be good for you to learn off of.
The install should be trimmed though, with a custom install and what not. You'll need the essentials (such as the core and stuff, no doubt), you'll want X, a desktop (Gnome, KDE, or whatever you would prefer), and xFree86. If you want to get online, you'll want the graphical Internet, aka a web browser, and if you install Pine, you can use pico for an editor to take notes in, and skip having to learn vi for the time being altogether.
Also, you might not need it for now, but for latter make sure to install gcc. Many linux apps are released as source code, and you'll need this to install many other programs should you chose to do so latter on (unless you can find an rpm). Perhaps someone can think of some other things you'll need. The default is to throw a lot of stuff on there you might not want though.
BTW, for someone relatively new to Linux, you might want to make sure to select the graphical boot option, or have it boot to run level 5. This will give you the X Windows interface off the bat, without having to do a startx and all...