How can he expect a seven year old OS to ship with drivers for equipment not made until the last year or two?! And as for not shipping driver disks, never ever buy a computer from ANYBODY that doesn’t include the drivers, and a lot more companies than Dell ship those disks.
The vast majority of hardware is rather generic. A network card should be recognized and initialized by the OS using a generic driver. If there is a more specific driver for the card provided by a newer update, that's fine, but the card should at least be seen by the OS and run in some simplistic mode.