While I would be one of the first to agree that 99% of Comcrap's are POS, I have to also say that the M700 laptop is the first Comcrap machine I ever saw do a near flawless install of Mandrake 7.2. All the major components, including the built-in 10/100 NIC, where recognized with the only hitch being that the install misidentified the video card. Fortunately, the card (ATI Rage Mobility) was on the supported list and only took 3 seconds to correct.
The install I just did today of Mandrake 8.0 *was* flawless. No hiccups, no weirdness. I will still have to manually load the driver for the Lucent Winmodem, but I had to do that under 7.2 as well.
Now, if you want to go on a rant about the DeskPros, Persarios, and several other lines they'd botched over the years, I'm right there with you. ;-)