As the inventory of old hardware pieces grows, I consume a lot of time installing the drivers on those.
My typical "run" looks like that:
- find and download all needed drivers (easy for e.g. Thinkpad, hard for OEM notebooks)
- burn those on CD (cry a lot for the machines without cd drive, but let's skip it for now)
- install all the drivers one by one on the machine
- (optional) find out that I forgot to burn n more drivers, so there's need to add some files to the CD
- 2137 hours consumed for a small windows xp notebook, 10000 more machines to go

I know there are some software which are able to install all the drivers unattended, but looks like 90% of them are scam.

I found out that ideally, there should be four main categories for automatised driver installation tools for the hardware I recognise as a retro:
- auto-install tool or CDs filled with most of drivers for 1995-1999 era with no internet connection required (Win 9x)
- auto-install tool or CDs filled with most of drivers for 1999-2001 era with no internet connection required (Win 9x/XP)
- auto-install tool for CDs filled with most of drivers for 2001-2006 era with no internet connection required (Win XP)
- auto-install tool (auto-downloader and auto-installer) with internet connection for the Windows XP era drivers

In ideal world, it will be nice to tick the boxes on all the categories with some nice solutions.

So, I wanted to ask you folks:
what do you typically use to install all the drivers your retro machine need?

Do you have any tools, CDs with driver compilations, some FTP with all the drivers?

It will be much easier if we can skip posts similar to "I install all the drivers manually, one-by-one, because it's a part of retro". Yeah, that's true, I like it sometimes, but that's not the idea of this topic.