Have you ever encountered a situation where you try to print something, but nothing works? Are you waiting for printing but the job is not completed? There are many reasons why a print job may not actually print, but one common reason is that a print job is stuck in the printer queue.
This can happen for a number of reasons. Let’s say you tried to print something a few hours ago, but the printer was turned off. As a result, you did not need the document, and you forgot about it. Then you go back and try to print. The print job is added to the queue, and if the previous job was not deleted automatically, it will lag behind a print job that was never printed.
Sometimes you can manually go in and delete a print job, but sometimes you just can’t get rid of it! In this case, you need to manually clear the print queue. In this article, I will show you how to clear the print queue.
Clear the Windows print queue
To resume printing services, follow these steps:
1. Go to Start, Control Panel and Administrative Tools. Double click the Services icon.
2. Scroll down to the Print Spooler service, right-click it and select Stop. To do this, you need to be logged in as an administrator. At this stage, no one will be able to print anything on any of the printers located on this server.
3. Next, you need to change to the following directory: C: WINDOWS System32 spool PRINTERS. You can also enter % windir% System32 spool PRINTERS in the address bar of the explorer if the C drive is not the default Windows partition. Delete all files in this folder.
This will clear all the print queues (if you are doing this on the server, it is a good idea to first make sure no other print jobs are being processed for any of the other printers on the server, because doing this step will delete those jobs as well).
4. You can now go back to the Services console, right-click and select Start for the Print Spooler service!
At this point, you should be able to print without any problems. If you prefer to use a script, that is, for a server, you can create a batch file using the commands below, or simply type them into the command line:
Net Stop Spooler
div% systemrut% e System32 e spool e printer e * / K / F / S
clean start queue
The first and third commands are pretty obvious: they stop and start the print spooler service. The middle command deletes everything in the printers folder, and / Q is for quiet mode, which means you won’t be prompted to delete every file. / F will forcefully remove all read-only files, and / S will remove all subdirectories if they exist. Deleting content from this folder will never harm your computer, so don’t worry if you see some files or folders and don’t know what they are for.
You can read my previous post if you want to know how to create a batch file Then all you have to do is run the batch file anytime you want to clear the print queue. Fortunately, the procedure for clearing the print queue is the same for Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista, and XP.
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