Need assistance, completely clueless...

I should start with the fact that i have absoloustely no idea what im doing and if i am in the wrong place and wasteing time, i apologize....
I am obviously quite lost!
If there is anyone out there whom would be willing and able to give me any help at all, please know it will be truly appreciated.
My situation is this, i am a 1st time computer buyer, my fiancè and i decided to get a laptop each. Since we are completely novice to computers, also we have very little income so we bought the cheapest thing we could find at walmart and happened to find the same model, a few yeas older at a pawn shop. So, we have 2 acer- aspire one notebooks or lap top i dont know the difference....
The one we bought from the pawnshop, the one i am currently useing, has a problem with opening programs or any kind, but not all of them... when trying to open things like, volume and notepad, real player opens and a box comes up saying real player needs software to play this clip, then says it cant find software to download to play this.... and it does this ALOT, sometimes instead of going to real player a windows box comes up and says windows needs to know who made this or where it came from in order to open it, and gives you the option to find the program on a list or search the web for one.... ive tried both but either way i dont know what im looking for....
so thats it, if someone can tell me what to do or whats going on, anything at all, i would truly, greatly, appreciate it.
Thank you for your time,
Ingela Puddicombe

Sounds like the version of Windows it is running is either infected, corrupt, or both. Technically what it sounds like, is something known as a file assocation error; basically you tell it to do "X" and it does "Y" instead. If it doesn't have a pirated copy of Windows on it, try doing the following:

1. Turn the computer off. Wait a second and turn it back on.
2. At the ACER screen, hold the Alt key and press the F10 key simultaneously to start Acer eRecovery.
3. Once eRecovery has loaded, click Restore to Factory Default Settings
4. Click OK to continue
5. From here, the eRecovery process will update all the data on the C: drive and restore everything back to factory defaults (basically as if the software on the PC was brand new again).
6. Once eRecovery has run, press OK to reboot unit