The print spooler is the program, or service, that organises all your print jobs. Each time you click print, the document is queued inside the print spooler.
From time to time though, the print spooler can become corrupted. Or rather one of the print jobs within the spooler can become corrupted.
When that happens, all printing will simply stop. You need to clear the print spooler to get things working again.
How To Clear The Print Spooler
The first thing to do is to stop the print spooler service. Then clear the print queue (delete all print jobs), and finally restart the spooler service.
Open a Command Prompt with Admin rights.
Click the Start button and then type “cmd”. Right-click Command Prompt and then left-click Run As Administrator.
Net Stop Spooler.
When the command prompt window opens, type –
net stop spooler
Then press the Enter key on your keyboard.
What that command will do is to stop the print spooler service from running allowing you to safely clear the print queue.net stop spooler
After hitting the Enter key on your keyboard, you should see a message confirming that the Print Spooler service has stopped.
Now that it’s stopped you can go ahead and clear the print queue.
Just leave the command prompt window open for now, you’ll need it later.
Clear Printer Queue
To clear the printer queue open the Run dialogue box (press the Windows key and the letter R on your keyboard).
Type – %systemroot%\System32\spool\printers\
Then click the OK button or press Enter on your keyboard.
You’ll see a message window pop up. “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder”. Just click the Continue button.
The Run Dialogue Box Window.
The Run dialogue window is just a quick way of jumping directly to the folder we need to be in.
If you prefer you can use File Explorer to open the folder. Navigate to C:/Windows/System32/Spool/Printers
Delete All The Printer Jobs
Inside the print spooler folder you’ll see all the print jobs (files) that are currently queued for printing. At least one of these is stuck. There’s something wrong with it which is why your printer has stopped working.
You could start by deleting them one at a time hoping to delete the one that’s causing the problem and thus allowing all the others to begin printing. But that’s a thankless task.
I’d recommend that you just delete everything in the folder.
Once all the files have been deleted you’ve successfully cleared the print spooler. That’s it, all that’s left to do now is to restart the spooler service.
Restart The Print Spooler Service
Go back to the Command Prompt window that you opened earlier.
Type – net start spooler
Press Enter on the keyboard and after a moment or two you should see the message that the service has successfully started.
Summary.
Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t be necessary to reboot your computer and printer. You haven’t changed or deleted any system files, all you’ve actually done is to delete some of your own files (documents).
But I find that just occasionally it helps. Reboot your PC and turn off your printer and then turn it back on.
Good luck.
