Iphone 11 hotspot issues with Acer aspire 1

I'm having issues hotspotting my iPhone 11 (work phone) to my work laptop(Acer Aspire 1 A114 series, windows 11). Everytime I try to connect to its hotspot it says it's unable to connect. The little hotspot icon flashes in the top corner of my iphone for a second to show the laptop trying to connect so i know they can communicate. I dont believe it's not a laptop issues as my S24 (personal phone) connects no worries. I know the iPhone isn't faulty as I can connect my S24 to its hotspot with no issues.

I work on the road so don't have a regular connection to WiFi but every so often need to download somewhat large files so I'd like to avoid using my personal data where possible. I've had the phone for about 6 months and it's been an issue from the beginning. I attempted to use USB tethering and it still wouldn't connect, even though it came up with the tethered icon on the taskbar. Bluetooth tethering works but is so slow that most of the time things im trying to load say its not stable enough and give up.

l've tried with maximised compatibility on and off and still get the same result.

I've had a look in device manager and it says my WiFi card is a Realtek 8821CE wireless Lan 802.11ac PLI-E NIC, currently running driver 2024.0.10.135 which is from 2021. I can find an older driver online from realtek themselves but I'm hesitant to downgrade the driver on my work laptop. I've found a couple posts saying this WiFi card is unreliable but I don't think the card is the issue because my S24 connect to it no worries.

I just double checked and my iPhone is running iOS 18.1.1 which it says is up to date as of the time posting

Any help is very much appreciated

Edit: more information on laptop model