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:
“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... [Washington] is always an entertaining spectacle. Look at it now. The present President has the name of Roosevelt, marked facial resemblance to Wilson, and no perceptible aversion, to say the least, to many of the policies of Bryan. The New Deal, which at times seems more like a pack of cards thrown helter skelter, some face up, some face down, and then snatched in a free-for-all by the players, than it does like a regular deal, is going on before our interested, if puzzled eyes.”
—Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980)