Any distro will work, just use Fluxbox or XFCE if you are not willing to learn a bit.
The main drawback on any system is never the distro, but rather the bling and extras of the WM or DE, so just use something lightweight.
You can make your system slightly faster with Gentoo, Arch Linux and Slackware by configuring what modules and drivers to load for your specific hardware and cut out hundreds of default modules that a distro like Ubuntu uses, but it is really not necessary, if you use Fluxbox you will be amazed at what new life you can inject into your system.
