"New"used computer

My wife got a computer from her job that they were getting rid of and I was going to give it to my dad since his computer is old and his computer has a 40gb hard drive, 512MB of Ram, and Intel celeron processor. I took his out and plugged the new used one up and it has 150GB hard drive, 2GB of Ram, and Intel Pentium processor. I got on the internet and I went to Google.com and it said the certificate error. It either expired or something like that. I shut it down and restarted it. It didn't do it again. Everything was good. I looked at the firewall setting and I couldn't change it to on, off, or automatic updates or anything. So I'm not sure what is going on and what her manager deleted off the computer. I tried to do a windows update through the internet and it said it couldn't detect firewall or (something else) can't remember. So I'm not sure what I need to do to make this computer in more working order for my dad. Anybody can help with this?

 

It doesn't sound like the user you login to windows has admin right. Ask her manager to give her local admin user then change all the setting or reinstall windows os bring it to a local computer store. Usually when a computer is given to an employee windows os should be wiped out.

 

my father in law works on computers and my managers son works on computers so I didn't know if it is something I could do or give it to one of them to work on.

 

I don't know can ya? I gave you a starting point...

 

I did ask my wife and she said that it was the main log in to the computer. When you look at the user it says administator

 

then that user should be able to change the setting, can you reinstall windows? do you have the software? hard to say without actually seeing it.

 

I don't have the software. Never tried a software upgrade or anything. I did save all my dads documents to a flash drive thinking that the new computer would work. How many users can use one disk of a windows operating system software?

 

Reinstall fresh and be done, it's really pretty easy just make sure back up any data you may need and wipe out the existing partitions when you get to that step. You may possibly need to go to the support site for that pc (Dell's are support.dell.com, HP is support.hp.com so it will be something like that) and get the network card driver if it's not there after the install. If it is then just install any missing drivers (video, sound etc.) directly from that box and you should be good to go

If you have any questions or need help feel free to hit me up via pm, I have done plenty of installs and should be able to talk you through it

 

Windows 7? Is it part of your wife work domain? Can you remove and set it as workgroup? You will need local admin user

 

I'm not even sure the outer shell has a name brand on it. I would have to double check but I didn't see anything.

 

This is a longshot but if it's something like a Dell or an HP, it could have been bought with the software preloaded on the hard drive. If it wasn't wiped by the company, sometimes they have a pristine restore partition with the install software loaded on there. Do a google search on your computer model with the word "Factory restore". If it exists, it will restore the computer to the way it was when delivered. It erases everything currently on the hard drive (except for the the restore partition). E.g. here's is a restore for Dell computers:
http://oit2.utk.edu/helpdesk/kb/entry/1420/