A service pack (in short SP) is a collection of updates, fixes, or enhancements to a software program delivered in the form of a single installable package. Companies often release a service pack when the number of individual patches to a given program reaches a certain (arbitrary) limit. Installing a service pack is easier and less error-prone than installing many individual patches, even more so when updating multiple computers over a network.
Service packs are usually numbered, and thus shortly referred to as SP1, SP2, SP3 etc. They may also bring, besides bug fixes, entirely new features, as is the case of SP2 of Windows XP.
Read more about Service Pack: Incremental and Cumulative SPs, Impact On Installation of Additional Software Components
Famous quotes containing the words service and/or pack:
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)