Ubuntu or Xubuntu?

My coach, a professed technophobe, has been given a laptop by the rugby team. While slow, (500 mhz 1/2 gig ram) this Dell laptop will be used for light web browsing and email client mostly. I’m going to install one of these flavors of free Linux software and recreate his XP environment.

While Xubuntu seems like the logical choice, I believe that the functionality of Ubuntu might be good too. Xubuntu doesn’t use open office by default, it doesn’t have automatic update check. However, all in all, it’s faster than Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has more drag and drop functionality, its design makes it much easier for anyone to navigate. However, Ubuntu might be a bit bloated to run efficiently on this machine…

Anyone have an opinion?