[TheBeardKing]

Anecdotal, as is this whole thread, but I have off and on experience with Linux, starting with Red Hat around 2001, several different distros, laptops and PCI wifi cards, and I don't remember ever having to separately download a NIC driver. In Windows, however, I have had to do this several times. I fully feel the author's frustration that in 8.1 Windows doesn't include their OEM's drivers. That's not to say the driver world of Linux is just peachy, far from it, but at least I can start connected to the internet to begin troubleshooting my issues.