This page is mostly here for my reference, and to vent as I couldn't find this information anywhere else (ie google).

• Compaq Armada laptops (as well as being extremely heavy) have an Ensoniq ESS ES1869 !AudioDrive? sound-card in them. These chips are SoundBlaster?-compatible, and can use sb drivers (under Linux and winblows). If you try to set the card to record at 44100Hz, the most you can get is 7954 Hz (samples per second). Possibly this could be resolved by using ESS-specific drivers instead of SB drivers, but it's not my machine to play around as root.
• Genius MF3000II CardBus 100/10 Mbit ethernet card - this is a removable PC-card that uses a Realtek 8139 chip. The pcmcia-cs package with Debian 3.0 (Woody) wants to use the tulip driver that is not only hopelessly outdated but is known to be incredibly buggy on some cards (v0.91g I think the driver identifies as). Not useful AT ALL when you are trying to install Debian with a boot cd and expecting to use your network link to complete the install. The 2.4 kernel's 8139too driver works mostly, but craps out at high utilisation. My solution was to download Donald Becker's 8139 drivers from http://www.scyld.com/network/rtl8139.html which have been fine so far.