It’s not particularly easy installing some of the official Service Packs on your computer. For instance, installing the Vista SP1 on one of our PCs took an age, after downloading, rebooting, fixing our drive and so on. It’s frustrating. Try doing this across multiple computers and the process can take longer than you may anticipate.

The answer is to install from a disc. Burn the Service Pack to a disc, then insert the disc on your computers and then update each one individually.

Microsoft have released the XP SP3 as an ISO image, which enables you to download, burn to a disc with your regular burning software and then install from your CD, from than from an installer package. This CD contains all the fixes, updates and security hotfixes released previously, so it’s a large file at around 540MB. If you’re installing on one computer, you’d be more wise installing from the Windows Update which will find and install the Service Pack most relevant to your system.