Welcome to Android Central! It'd be ideal for us to see your Storage stats screen in the Settings menu. I'm not sure what the 1.7 GB available is part of, since your phone's specs list 16 GB or storage ROM. Since it was a pre-Ice Cream Sandwich phone, I assume that 16 GB is divided into an App Storage and an Internal Storage (or Internal SD) partition--when it comes to installing apps or downloading data, the App Storage is the important part.
If you can, take a screenshot of that Storage screen and post it here (using either the Tapatalk-based Android Central Forums app, the Tapatalk app, or the actual Android Central website on your desktop--the AC app itself can't post images).
In the meantime, this guide might shed some light on your situation:
http://forums.androidcentral.com/amb...-warnings.html