Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2): "But what, exactly, is slipstreaming, you ask? Back when Microsoft was developing Windows 2000, the company decided to create up a more elegant way of integrating service packs and other fixes back into the core OS, so that enterprise customers could always maintain an install set of the latest version of Windows, ready to be installed at any time on new machines. In the NT days, this process was convoluted at best, and service pack installs often required users to reinstall components that had previously been installed. It just wasn't elegant, but Windows 2000 fixed all that, and in XP the slipstreaming process is largely unchanged."