Quote Originally Posted by BIGGS
the laptop is from my college and is set to logon a domain, ie the schools network so it will connect to their network drives etc. and my tower at home is part of a workgroup.
Check for a firewall running on the laptop. I have seen this kind of problem due to restrictions for incoming/outgoing addresses that are allowed to perform networking functions. Also a misconfigured firewall on your PC might cause the same problem.
If you really need to change your laptop's configuration there are tools that can help you get the cached admin password