Back in early 2000's I ran redhat for a bit then I lost interest in computers. I heard Sony vaio's aren't always the best laptops to use Linux. I'm really interested in trying Mint so ill see if I can boot it live from disk and check out if everything works esp the wifi. Bought a book for Linux commands just to read and learn. Any other advice for a newbie?
I like Mint (I use it myself) and it will probably run okay also, but it may be a little slower than the others I listed. If you go with Mint, I would suggest either the MATE or XFCE desktops, rather than Cinnamon.
I think the Vaio will be okay. The absolute biggest hassle I run into is with new computers that were "designed for Windows 8" because the old "BIOS" firmware has been replaced with "UEFI" which is much more difficult to work with. Not impossible, but every OEM does UEFI differently, and it's a pain.
Redhat is now a pay-for subscription, mostly for businesses. The free variant is called Fedora. It is nice too, and it might run on your Vaio, but it might also be slow with your hardware.
The command line is always good to know a bit about, or at least not be afraid of it. You'll be fine there. But most anything you need to do these days can be done with a GUI.
So, besides running the live DVD, which run a little slower... you might even want to do full installs instead. They are all extremely easy if you let it install to the whole hard drive and blow Windows away. You can do a full Linux install with just about any version in under 45 minutes. Startup and shutdown will be much faster. And you can start learning (or re-learning) how to install a few other programs when you have it up and running. Every distro has a "Software Manager" or "Package Manager" to make installing new programs a snap... no more compiling from source. Well, hardly ever, anyway.
I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised how far Linux has come since the old Redhat days. Jump in with both feet!
Cheers!