This seems like a really stupid question. the answer is probably incredibly obvious but:
I'm running Mandrake 10.0 Official on 3 different machines:
AMD64 3000 notebook
P4 3GHz Server
AMD Duron Desktop

The tab key when working in the CLI (which I do most of the time) is a great time saver, and on the Server & Desktop machine, it has the added function of displaying command parameters (might be the wrong word to use) for a given command. For example:
If I type "telnet" and press tab, it lists all the available connections from my hosts file
likewise, if I type "service" and press tab, I get a list of all the available services from /etc/init.d, press tab again, and it gives the options such as "(reload | restart | start | stop)"

However on my notepad, this functionality is gone. It's not entirely necessary, but as with most tools it's make life a lot easier.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

just realised that the actual name of the process was "command completion", duh
the configuration lies in the /etc/bash_completion.d/ directory along with a bash_completion script in /etc
so obvious!

for anyone who's had the same problem (however unlikely) there is an rpm with mandrake called:
bash-completion-YYYYmmdd-Xmdk.noarch.rpm on CD2