There are plenty of resources on the web which you can refer to. A good one to start with is:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=current

They also have plenty of reviews of different distros[?]. Most distros have a livecd[?] so you can try it out without disturbing your existing OS. This allows you to:

• check whether that particular distro and your hardware gets along with each other
• assess whether that particular distro and you get along with each other
• etc