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.
My default XP installs all recognize - as generic - the network cards I use. Including some ancient 3COM cards (which still have coax connections on them).
This article is nothing but FUD... Starting with "Vista infection" and moving on to condemn Microsoft for NOT bundling Dell's custom drivers to building a slipstreamed CD (when the by-far-easier AND faster approach is to do the default XP install then install the patches).
I guess I should condemn Linux for requiring archaic command line interfaces, for not including MS Office as a standard configuration option through Dell, and requiring me to use apt-get a ton to get what I need?
It might be rather generic but then there’s the question of how generic was it 7 years ago? And how close does the card in this guy’s system match up to what was a generic network card 7 years ago? XP does run with generic drivers on stuff when it can, many times I’ve had the 640x480x16 screen while I installed video drivers. Really the guy needed to take a 7 year old version of Linux and see how well it handled installing on this system, if 7 year old generic Linux network drivers handled this card then he has a point (though a small one since driver disks are actually pretty standard issue in spite of what he says).