New
#11
Yep you will need one or the other as Kego mentions or you can play around with the sharing permissions and Security settings but that won't be as secure.
You can only join a Homegroup with the netbook but you can't create one, that's because the netbook has Windows starter. You can use the Desktop to create one. After that you can work with the permission settings to determine which folders you want to share.
I don't see any reason to do this the hard way and it's no wonder you had problems sharing files.