Yes. The student version should work fine.  What where you doing which produced the error? If you're still seeing these problem you may wish to contact Wolfram technical support (http://www.wolfram.com/support/contact/)
There are a couple of things which might be causing this problem. 
Is Mathematica able to access the internet?
      http://support.wolfram.com/kb/12420
Do you see any other messages when this goes wrong?