[boogerbear]

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).

[Knitebane]

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).

I've actually done this recently...by accident.

I had a newly built system that I accidentally booted up with an antique Knoppix LiveCD from 2002.

It saw my new Lexmark Laser printer, the Intel gigabit network card and the nVidia video card just fine.

[Knitebane]

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?

Network cards are not new technology. While some of the new ones may provide larger buffers or encryption or VLANs, the basic underlying technology hasn't changed in decades. For Microsoft to build an OS that can't fire up a network card is bordering on idiocy.