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.
I’ve been working with PC hardware and software for 13 years and I’ve seen plenty of hardware of ALL types including network adapters that couldn’t be recognized, especially by OSes more than 5 years older than the hardware.
PnP hardware “just works” with XP too, unless somebody, usually the hardware manufacturer, screwed something up.
No what he said was HIS hardware had some issues which were easily solved with provided disks with ZERO attempt to find out if an equivalent version of Linux would or would not have similar problems. Basically he did half a test made a whole bunch of assumptions about the other half of the test LIED about the general availability of drivers disks and drew a conclusion that’s not backed up. You then expanded that into XP just not working, which is claim even the assuming lying author didn’t jump to.