Kind of a long response, bear with me please.
It depends on if it's star NPC's or rifle fodder, scene extras, etc.
For star NPC's, I make character sheets for them. I made an Excel file that helps during character creation, keeping skill points straight, attribute increases or decreases, even calculates wound thresholds, movement rates, etc. Unfortunately my star NPC's have a disturbing habit of getting killed. Two of them have gotten killed within 3 sessions of each other.
For rifle fodder and the like, I've got some premade general NPC's (bandit/marauder, Russian soldier, etc) on 3x5 cards, with their attributes and important skills. Mostly what they're likely to use against the PC's (small arms, support weapons, hand to hand, hand weapons).
In combat, I treat the star NPC's like another PC. I use a notebook for initiative and write any modifiers next to their name. Rifle fodder either goes as a group, as several different groups if there are a lot of them or the weapons vary wildly, or individually if there are only a couple. EDIT: Basically the same thing Tegyrius said.
I'm most likely going to buy a laptop at some point, and then keeping track of initiative will be much easier. Cutting down on the amount of stuff I have to print or write by hand will be nice, too. I don't want to print out the stuff I write on my own, I REALLY don't want to print out the pdf's of published adventures or adventures from Challenge.
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