New laptop will not connect to homegroup

Just bought a new Dell laptop nearly identical to the one STOLEN from us last week (not that I'm bitter)

It just will not connect to the homegroup. First it was telling me that all the dates/times have to be sync'd (all but one were set to EST, one to Indiana Eastern) so I fixed that, even though that didn't seem to bother the last one. Now it says there is a homegroup ready to join in networking, but when I try it says homegroup encountered an error or Windows cannot setup a homegroup on this computer.

I did a restart of the router, removed the anti-virus software on the laptop, etc. And of course all the other PC's on the network are connected just fine, albeit by hardwire. Why is this so hard?

 

Can the laptop connect to the internet (wirelessly)?