It used to be the case that whenever you wanted to use ADB or FastBoot with a device, you were required to install a specific driver for each device. For anyone regularly flashing several devices or developers who test on numerous different phones and tablets, this could prove to be something of an inconvenience, especially when setting up for the first time and having to hunt around in a dingy corner of an OEM website looking for the correct driver. Thankfully, things are somewhat simpler nowadays thanks to several different solutions to this old issue.

You may remember us previously talking about the Universal Naked Driver by XDA Senior Member 1wayjonny. This is a Windows based tool (compatible with XP, Vista, 7 and 8) that allows you to make use of ADB, Fastboot, and (for ASUS devices) APX on over 250 different devices with minimal effort. Check out the link above and the forum thread for more information on this one.

Continuing on from the success of the Universal Naked Driver, Koush has taken the device/vendor ids collected within the UND thread and used them to create an alternative solution, which claims to work on all Android phones and all versions of Windows, presumably XP and above. You can find Koush's Universal ADB Driver and the source for it from the G+ post linked to above.

Last but certainly not least is a project entitled Casual Android Driver Installer, or CADI for short. This is the brainchild of XDA Senior Member jrloper, and like the two already mentioned options, it attempts to alleviate the frustration of device-specific drivers. The difference with CADI though is that it is fully integrated into the CASUAL by XDA Elite Recognized Developer AdamOutler and takes a somewhat different approach to the problem. It uses elements of an open source USB device driver installer called libwdi by Pete Batard and essentially determines which devices are connected via USB before generating drivers on the fly and automatically taking care of the installation process. That's a pretty good example of three open source projects coming together in a glorious trinity of non-proprietary loveliness if ever I saw one.

So if you are still plagued by the problem of individual drivers for each of your devices, it's definitely in your best interests to look into one, or indeed all of these options. Let us know your preferred method of driver avoidance in the comments below.