I would suggest Mint. Considering the hardware, the XFCE version. Have you looked into any hardware upgrades for these machines? I've found that a simple ram or hdd-->ssd upgrade can be rather inexpensive these days.
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There are a lot of distros which are more focused on old hardware than Mint, but Mint definitely wins in the "this distro will be familiar and discoverable to people who are used to Windows" department. If it works, it's great for that reason.
I recommend arch linux. Also most desktop environment are light enough to run on old hardware. Just disable file content indexing
I'd have to respectfully disagree with you here, as despite arch being a great distro, I wouldn't say that it's very noob-friendly