Don’t you just hate it when your printer messes up? I most certainly do. Every once in a while, a document gets stuck in the spooler system and no documents will print. And if you don’t catch it right away you end up with a stack of documents piling up in your print queue.
You may of course unplug the printer, cut power and pray that this will let you to delete the stuck file from the queue. However, Sometimes even that won’t do you any good. What then? Do you reboot the computer?
Well, There might just be one more thing to try, first…
Purge Stalled Print Jobs … manually
First off: Make sure all print jobs are complete and that no new print jobs are being submitted.
- Open
Services.msc
(Click the Start Button and type in: “Services
” in the search box)
Service, and stop it (Right Click, Choose STOP)
Locate the Print Spooler - Open an explorer window, and navigate to the folder:
C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS
(Copy the above URL and paste it in the Explorer Address field) - Delete the SPL- and SHD-files with the lowest number (which should be the file causing problems). Or to be safe, delete everything.
(Files in the Printers are named xxxx.spl or xxxx.shd where xxxx is a hexadecimal) - Now go back to the Services Window and Start the
Print Spooler
Service.
The DOS way…
Prefer using the Command Prompt? OKAY, here’s how:
- Open the Command Prompt as Adminstrator (Click the Start-button and type
CMD
, then Right Click CMD.EXE in the search results and choose “Run as Administrator”) Type Net Stop Spooler
(This will stop the Print Spooler Service)- Type
cd\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS
- Type
Del *.*
(and Confirm to delete) - Type
Net Start Spooler
to Start the Print Spooler Service again
About Thomas
Computer geek from the age of 7, which amounts to 30 years of computer experience. From the early days (when every computer company had their own OS) of DOS, Windows 1.0 through Seven...
Search Windows Guides