Compaq laptop modem

I was recently gifted a Compaq Presario 1810 laptop. I have purged it
of the viruslike OS and installed Linux Mandrake 8.1 and all runs great
except for the stupid modem. I tried using lspci and less /proc/pci to
find some info on the device but it does not appear several other
devices appear and I can account for all of them but no modem. Is it
possible that this modem is so wiggle-jacked that the kernel doesn't
even find it as a pci device? (kernel 2.4.17)

thanks in advance

Joseph