The laptop was running a fresh installation of Windows 8 Pro along with Microsoft Office 2013 so I was fairly confident nothing was corrupt. It turns out that the new laptop was not able to see our domain controller as the global catalog server and hence was not able to find our mail server via Active Directory.
In order to fix this I created a registry entry that manually pointed the laptops to our domain controller handling global catalog. To do so, first close outlook then open up the registry editor (regedit). It is always a good practice to backup the registry before making changes so to do so select "Computer" at the top of the tree, then click File > Export. After doing so locate the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftExchangeExchange Provider. Make a String Value (REG_SZ) with the name DS Server and enter the value as the FQDN of your global catalog services domain controller, SAMPLE-DC.DOMAIN.LOCAL.