O Windows Starter é um sistema operacional muito limitado, e é por isso que é gratuito.
Ele não aceita conexões de rede de entrada, portanto você não pode compartilhar arquivos com ele.
Da Wikipedia:
Much like its predecessor, Windows XP Starter Edition, this edition sells in 139 countries such as Russia, Brazil, People's Republic of China, Nepal, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, and Thailand. Microsoft does not make it available in developed technology markets such as the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan (although users can install a 30 day trial-version from the 32-bit DVD).[4][5] Vista Starter has significant limitations, such as allowing a maximum of three applications with a user interface at once, not accepting incoming network connections, a watermark in the corner of the screen, and a physical memory limit of 1 GB. Unlike other editions, a 64-bit version of Starter Edition has not been released.[6] It supports AMD's Athlon XP, Duron, Sempron and Geode processors, and Intel's Celeron, Pentium III processors and certain models of Pentium 4. The usable portion of the hard disk has a limit of 250 GB. Starter Edition comes with some locale-specific desktop wallpapers not found in other editions of Vista.
Se você quer um sistema operacional livre que tenha recursos completos e não seja extremamente limitado, você terá que usar um pouco do Linux. Eu recomendaria o Ubuntu para alguém novo, embora existam versões menores ainda mais exigentes do computador.