Our driver CD has everything that we use often enough to be worth putting on the main CD. I try to leave out stuff that just chews up space and doesn't get used very often. But first, a word about the general organisation of the
other CDs we keep around and use often: Win 2000 SP 4, Win XP Home SP2, Win XP Pro SP2, IE 6, Office 2000. These all have their own CDs: plain vanilla from the factory. (Or copies of, of course, so as not to scratch up the real thing.)
All the utility stuff, however, lives on the Win 98SE install CDs. These contain:
ROOT FOLDER:
Ad-Aware
latest Ad-Aware defs.ref
DiskState (very old no-nag, no install version - the link is to the current bloatware instead)
Hijackthis
LSPfix
Spybot
Spywareblaster (haven't really tried this properly yet)
Startuplist
the usual Win98 SE install files
BROWSERS FOLDER:
Acrobat 5.x ('cause 6.x is so bloated and horrible)
Firefox
Flash (practically never use this)
Mozilla
MSVBVM60.dll (for Hijackthis and other stuff)
Netscape 4.76 (just for the email app, which a lot of people still use)
Open Office
Opera
PMView (shareware version)
Thunderbird
Winzip 7 ('cause 8 is so bloated and horrible)
TOOLS FOLDER:
Maxtor's big drive enabler (for >128GB drives on W2K and etc)
MSConfig (the XP one, runs on W2K)
NTConfig (freeware, similar purpose to MSConfig)
Tweakui
DRIVERS FOLDER:
About 6 assorted Detonator drivers
About 3 assorted Hyperion drivers
Netcom internal modem driver
Assorted Rockwell external modem drivers
Couple of other common modem drivers
VIA sound & video drivers for older boards (KT-133A vintage stuff)
Generic Realtek NIC drivers, one size fits all
Logitech mouse drivers (Huh? what are they still doing there? Haven't used them since Win95 days. There is something I can delete to make more room.)
Why have all this on the W98 CD?
Because until quite recently, it was more common to install W98 than any other OS. With any luck, you could do the entire job without swapping CDs around. And if you were doing a non-Win 98 install (W95, W2K, XP), then you still only needed 2 CDs.
For a long, long time, we managed to organise it such that we didn't even need to take the lid off for a reinstall: everything we built had a VIA chipset (Hyperions), Nvidia-based video card (Dets), Realtek NIC, and Netcom or other same-chipset internal modem. So you could just load the usual stuff and everything would work.
Now, alas, we are selling quite a few Nforce III and Nforce IV boards, and various different modems. When these systems start coming back for the inevitabe reinstalls, we will have to update the driver CD to deal with them. At present, there is no need, as we are doing new builds with them and just use the factory driver CDs.
Why not put IE 6 on the W98 CD? Because our local ISP is forever sending us half a dozen fresh copies of their install CD, which we never use for its intended purpose (we
always set up an internet connection manually - install CD's always get stuff wrong) and we have enough drink coasters already. Besides, they are a really bright red colour, so they are always easy to find when you need one.
What about CD burning software? We keep maybe 20 different versions of Nero, Easy CD Cremator, and etc. handy. This is becauise you have to be careful not to go pirating stuff by mistake and we try to match up the version with the one that think probably shipped with the drive originally.
Finally, we have a CD with
Winwall (a neat little freeware wallpaper changer) and a selection of Tannin's wildlife pictures. This stays on its own CD because I'm only allowed to put it on the machines of people we particularly like. (Must remember to make more copies: we keep losing the damn thing.)
