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A Service Pack (in short '''SP''') is a collection of updates, fixes and/or enhancements to a Software Program delivered in the form of a single installable package. Many companies, such as Microsoft or Autodesk , typically release a service pack when the number of individual Patch es to a given program becomes too large (a notable exception to this 'rule' concerned Windows 98 SE ). Installing a service pack is easier and less error-prone than installing a high number of patches individually, even more so when updating multiple computers over a network.

A service pack can be ''incremental'', which means it only contains the updates that weren't present in the previous service packs or, more commonly, ''cumulative'', which means it also includes the contents of all its predecessors.

Usually service packs are numbered and thus shortly referred to as SP1, SP2 etc. It is notable however that they may bring, besides bug fixes, entirely new features, as is the case for instance with the SP2 of Windows XP .


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