Im running Mandrake 9.1 and Ive found the Mandrake Control
Center to be lacking in ability to disable hardware, add hardware,
check drivers, etc.

Are there command line options that might work better?

Thanks in advance

Use the control center, cauz in command line = harder :/

So?

From console it's not that easy. As drivers are kernel modules you load a driver by loading a module, unload - by unloading and so on.

To load a module you run
modprobe modulename
To unload
rmmod modulename
To list all loaded modules
lsmod

A module won't load if it can't find hardware it supports. So to load driver for your hardware you need to know which module to load (usually kernel documentation can tell you which drivers supports which hardware).

Also /proc/ directory may be helpful. For instance, if you run
cat /proc/pci
all PCI devices are listed (with basic info)