please try it again. But I can completely understand why you don't want to go near it. But at least you will have a plan for if it all goes pete tong.
Personally I like fedora but there are more user friendly versions out there.
Just make a live OS usb stick and boot it using that and see if everything works.
I haven't had to go searching for drivers for a good 5 years with any Linux installation. If its an old machine with XP on it I would be very surprise if the hardware required any tinkering of drivers to get it all working.