John,
It's possible that you have some sort of virus or malware, a hardware problem or some other issue.  Network connection issues are sometimes hard to resolve.
Are there any other computers connected successfully to the network, wired or wireless?  Are you sending theses emails from the same network?
Do you have any virus or malware software installed on the computer?  If so, I would run a full scan and see if anything is detected.
Next, try to determine if you are an administrator on the computer.  I don't have win 8, only win 7, but if you can go to start, then control panel then user (or user access) you should see one or more user names, domains and groups.   If it only lists you and it says 'administrator' in the group, then you are an administrator on the laptop.
In control panel, there is also a tab for 'Network and Internet'.  Open that and click on 'network connections'.  There may be more than one, does it (or all of them) say disabled?  Double click on it (or them) one at a time, then try clicking the diagnose tab.
Write back to the list with the results and see if any other ideas come up to help troubleshoot your problem.
Paul 

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