Need help trying to network two PC's to external hard drives

I have a problem. I have a desktop and a laptop. Both my desktop and laptop are in my home office and the desktop is where i have 2 external hard drives connected to it. I am wanting to have it so that I can network the laptop as well to both of these drives, so that I can read and write files to these two drives just like I already can with the desktop.

I followed this advice but I can't get it to work.

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/two-computers-one-external-hard-drive-56819.html

I have the first PC (desktop) set up like in the link saying to but when I go on the second PC (laptop) it doesn't see the first computer in the network menu.

I didn't think it was this difficult to network two computers to be able to access the same ext drives.

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TIA