Maybe they do maybe they don’t. You can’t make universal statements like that. There’s many manufacturers of motherboards and onboard NICs. Some will follow the generic protocols some won’t. The ones that do follow the generic protocols will work with the generic drivers that ship with XP, the ones that don’t won’t. Another part of the problem is they might not announce themselves properly to XP, there’s a lot of places PnP can fall down, so even if the adapter will work with the generic XP drivers if it doesn’t establish itself with XP as a network adapter that will work with the generic drivers XP won’t try to run it with the generic drivers.
Ethernet might be ethernet, but cards aren’t always cards. If his adapter isn’t 2001 generic, or doesn’t announce through the PnP that it’s 2001 generic then XP won’t work or won’t know it can work. There’s a lot of things missing from the article to determine the exact problem. He could have gone to Device Manager and learned a lot. Anything that shows up in Unknown Devices is not communicating itself to XP properly, thus XP doesn’t know what it is and doesn’t know which generic drivers to try to use with it. You might actually be able to get the generic drivers to work, I’ve done that before, taken a network that was showing as Unknown told Windows it was a network card and it worked long enough to go get the full drivers. He didn’t bother with that though, he just complained about a 2001 OS not living up to 2008 standards and then lied about manufacturers other than Dell not shipping driver disks.
I've been working with PC hardware for 20 years. I've yet to see an Ethernet card that was sufficiently different that it wouldn't at least be recognized. At least since the death of dip switches.
It might not work properly, but the OS would at least see it.
Another part of the problem is they might not announce themselves properly to XP, there’s a lot of places PnP can fall down, so even if the adapter will work with the generic XP drivers if it doesn’t establish itself with XP as a network adapter that will work with the generic drivers XP won’t try to run it with the generic drivers.
Which only points out how screwed up Windows XP is. PnP hardware with Linux "just works." Even Linux from 8 years ago.
He didn’t bother with that though, he just complained about a 2001 OS not living up to 2008 standards and then lied about manufacturers other than Dell not shipping driver disks.
No, what he did was install the most commonly used Windows OS and, out of the box, it fails to do things that even the oldest and simplest Linux install has routinely done for a decade.