I feel like your and my experiences are completely reversed. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for 14 years, and in the past 8 years the idea of d

I feel like your and my experiences are completely reversed. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for 14 years, and in the past 8 years the idea of downloading drivers or hardware not working out of the box has become completely alien to me. The last driver I had to download for Linux was for a Lexmark printer in 2005. Everything since then has just worked. When I get in front of a windows machine, though, I'm always ripping through original packaging looking for network, graphics or peripheral drivers, even in Windows 7. I remember Windows XP SP2 didn't ship with drivers for the Intel Etherexpress line of network cards when it came out after 5 years of the eepro being one of the most popular network cards on the market. Insane. My normal trick became to boot the system onto a linux live cd or USB drive, download the drivers and then boot back to windows to install them.