Are you trying to honestly say that the Intel Pro 10/100 chipset, that has been out and available for 10 years, isn't a standard implementation?
How about this then? How about a NetBSD man page from 2002 listing full support for the Intel 82557 chip? The Linux drivers use the NetBSD code, BTW.
STOP THE ASSUMPTIONS. All you’re managing to prove is that you hate MS and believe all faults are always their fault.
My, my. You certainly are getting wound up about this shortcoming with Windows XP. Personal stake maybe?
Anybody that doesn’t know to look on the CD marked DRIVERS when a hardware wizard comes up and ASKS FOR THE DRIVER CD, is probably illiterate and shouldn’t be using computers anyway.
What wizard? The writer of the article clearly stated that Windows XP didn't even recognize the card. No wizard, no pop-up. Just nothing.
Now who's doing the assuming?
I know Dell excels at screwing things up. I’ve got Del PowerEdges that probably have the same network adapter, or at the very least it has the same Intel chipset in the network adapter. It doesn’t get recognized by Win2K3 either, it knows it’s a network adapter but it can’t figure out what kind. Now I could probably go through the trouble of telling it’s an Intel blah blah, ie doing what Dell failed to do, or I could just install Dell’s drivers. The driver install takes 3 minutes and doesn’t even require a reboot. It’s not that tough.
It’s not just the Intel chip, it’s what Dell does with the chip. There’s a lot more to PnP than the core Intel chip and if you have half the experience you claim you know that.
My my you sure do love logical fallacies, no I don’t have any personal stake, and it wouldn’t matter if I did. Any winding up happening here is the frustration of watching you hammer the same 100% unsupported assumptions over and over and over. It’s really pathetic. None of your arguments are even slightly supported by facts, they’re all built on your assumptions. You assume too much.
And here’s where you run into a problem because you haven’t touched Windows since 1999. Any time there’s hardware in the computer that XP (and every version of Windows since) does not have drivers installed and configure for there’s a New Hardware wizard displayed on boot, unless the user has explicitly told Windows not to ignore the fact that it doesn’t know what that hardware is. Meaning on the first boot if there’s hardware that didn’t get properly detected and configured during the install there WILL be a New Hardware wizard, period, not negotiable, not avoidable. That’s how he knows Windows didn’t recognize the card, because a New Hardware wizard popped up and said it didn’t recognize the card. Not assuming, actually having experience with what we’re talking about.