How about this then? The article references a Dell Inspiron 530s. The Dell specs state that it comes with the Intel 82557-based 10/100 network chip.
I pulled the HCL from the Knoppix CD I have from 2002. Guess what? The 82557 chip is fully supported. Intel Ethernet chips are industry standard.
You can whine and complain and spin all you want but facts are facts.
It IS an industry standard chip. And Windows XP took tweaking to get it to recognize on of the most widely used network adapters ever made.
So the chip is fully supported. Does that implementation follow 2001 PnP standards?
I’m not whining or spinning I’m pointing out the difference between what we KNOW and what you and the author ASSUME.
Here’s what we know:
He installed a 2001 OS on a 2008 computer with 2008 hardware and there were some devices that XP couldn’t connect to with the generic drivers.
Now here’s the things we don’t know:
If any of that hardware complies with 2001 OS communication layer standards
If any of that hardware complies with 2001 PnP standards
If any XP’s generic drivers could have been forced to work with the hardware
If any other 2001 OS works with that hardware out of the box
You make a lot of assumptions about how it must be MS’s and XP’s fault, which is funny since you claim to have been Windows free since 2 years before XP came out, but they’re all just assumptions. Could the problem be XP? Of course. Could the problem be the hardware? Yup.