My print queue is stuck.
How do I print anything?
Hi, everyone. Leo
Notenboom here for askleo.com. Here's the question.
I'm trying to delete a document in the queue of my printer, but I can't.
It says deleting, but it never finishes.
I've tried to cancel the same document
from the field of my printer, but it doesn't disappear.
Restarting my computer,
restarting the document, turning off the printer, unplugging the cables.
Still, I can't.
What else can I do?
It doesn't allow other documents to print.
Honestly, this is not a new problem.
It happens occasionally.
And I'm honestly surprised that Windows hasn't come up with some way
of automatically detecting and resolving this issue.
However, very fortunately,
it's really not that difficult for you to take care of it yourself.
I'm going to show you two different ways
to do that, then I'll talk about why it's an issue at all.
So here we are over in Windows Ten.
The first way I'm going to show you is using the command prompt.
Now I'm right clicking on start.
I'm going to fire up Windows PowerShell admin.
If you've got Windows command prompt admin here, then you're great,
because this is PowerShell, the technique that I'm working with doesn't quite work.
I just fire up command within PowerShell CMD proof.
And now I'm running command prompt.
The old style command prompt net stop spooler.
And it was stopped successfully. Great.
Now I'm doing this lengthy delete, which is out on the companion article
on which this video was based. del /Q %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.*.
So what I'm doing is I'm deleting
the contents of system root, which is really just SQL
and \windows, but this covers the case where it's happening.
Different system 32 Spool printers.
And then leading all the files in that folder. /Q means be quiet about it.
And if there were any files there, those are now gone.
Now I'm going to go back to the Spooler
command that I had and I'm going to say net start spooler.
Spooler service is starting.
And now the queue is empty because that's what that delete did.
And your print Spooler is working again.
You should be able to print. Now.
The other approach to doing this involves firing up the print queue.
So I'm going to go to my settings app and look at my devices, my printers.
I have one printer here and I'm going to open the queue.
In my case, the queue is empty.
But what you would see in the problem you're looking at here, of course,
is that there would be documents here and they're not printing.
There's probably one waiting, as you mentioned, and some that aren't.
Okay, what we will do is we will go to
Computer Management Services and Applications.
I'm just going to expand that and then click on Services.
I'm going to scroll down here until I find print Spooler.
You can see that it's running.
I will right click on it and stop it.
Now it's not running.
Now I'm going to essentially do the same thing that I did earlier.
I'm going to fire up Windows File Explorer
and this time go to Windows System 32.
Down here is Spool.
Printers.
We need to be able to access that.
Now in my case, the folder is empty because I don't have this problem.
Basically, same thing.
Delete all the files that you find in this folder.
That's it. That is the queue.
Once that's done, then you go back to Computer management.
Right click on the print spooler and say Start and off it goes.
And again, you should be able to print it just fine.
Unfortunately, this happens often enough that I end up having a batch file,
a three line batch file that contains those commands I did that.
I entered into a command exe.
So why is this a thing at all?
Well, here's the thing.
Windows is ultimately a multiuser operating system.
Multiple people can be doing things at the same time on the same system.
It's not as obvious if you've got just one keyboard and one monitor.
But think of the case where you have a printer connected to your machine
and there are other people in your home that are using it.
They could all be printing to that one printer at the same time.
The way Windows handles that is not
by sending their stuff directly to the printer, but rather by spooling it.
In other words,
the disk information that they're printing is first written to disk.
That way, if something else happens to be
printing, then the spooler is just collecting what needs to be printed next.
Then after each print job, as it's called,
is done, has been completed by the person doing the printing,
then the spooler basically walks through that queue and sends each of those jobs
in their entirety to the printer, one after the other.
It's a way of managing and making sure that each job is separate by itself
and not somehow interleaved with somebody else's printing.
The problem, of course, is that the queue gets confused.
The print spooler gets confused.
Sometimes it loses track of the fact that the printer is or is not working,
is or is not offline, is or is not connected.
Why? Like I said when we started, I don't know,
I kind of would expected by now that this is something that Windows would have
figured out a way to solve or at least work around a little bit more seamlessly.
But the fact is, it is what it is.
And now you know how to clear the printer queue.
For upcoming for comments,
for related links and more, visit Ask.leo.com/4288
I'm Leo. Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.