mandrake network card issues

Once I had my other hp computer running knoppix, I decided to try my mandrake live cd to see if I could get the network card working. I booted the live cd and the network worked just fine so I reinstalled mandrake 10.0 and tried again. Once more after I had set up the network, I could not get the network to function properly. I tried changing all sort of settings and it turns out that the 'hotplug' option needs to be turned off. Now the network is fine so I think I will stick with the mandrake installation. All of this shows the utility of the live linux cd's.