My Toshiba laptop won't connect to the Internet even though it's connected to Wifi

Please help. I know very little about computers. Please excuse me if I explain things wrong and use incorrect terminology.

I hadn't used my laptop for a while, and yesterday, it didn't come on when I tried to turn it on. I ended up taking out the battery, then holding down the power button for 30 seconds. The laptop worked fine after that, and I was able to access the Internet. When I went to shut it down, it said that it had updates to install, so I told it to install the updates and shut off when it was done.

When I started it up today, it seemed slow to get to the Toshiba screen. It looked liked it was still installing updates, which I found odd because it had shut itself down yesterday after installing all of them (I thought). I shut it down again after the updates (or whatever that was) had completed, and I was able to access one site very briefly. However, now I can't access the Internet at all. The Internet Explorer page comes up for a few seconds and then closes again to the Toshiba page. When I check my connection, it says that the Wifi is connected. I can't figure out why I can't access the Internet. Please help.

Edited to add that I'm using Windows 8. Also, I just tried to scan with Norton, but the scan won't work.