Hey
I am pretty novice on linux myself, but i installed afew boxes. From my experience, if you have a rather new distribution, you dont need any additional drivers afaik. What you really need to do is just to burn out the iso's and boot your old Dell up on the first one, and then follow the onscreen instructions.
A good distro could be the Fedora Core, which is pretty straight forward. Allso Ubunto is very good for the novice from my experience. And i do think that you should go with the most userfriendly one you can get.
I think in ubunto there is a automatic update system, allso for drivers, but since this is a test station, you can just try out different flawors of distro's.
Just one thing, when u get to the partition part of the installation, just let the built in diskprobe do its thing, since you can easely screw something up. This part is very different from windows OS'es, in the way it uses like 5+ different partitions instead of like 1 or 2.