Indemnity83

I have often received a call, or gone out to a site where there is a print job stuck in the print que on the server that is holing up everything. You can try to cancel the job at the printer, or at the server. You’ve tried to restart the server and restart the printer but the print job just sits there staring at you the whole time. While not as bad as upsetting as the famed “PC LOAD LETTER” error it can still make you want to chuck your printer and/or computer off the roof.

So how do you purge the vexing print que? It’s actually easier than you might think. It only takes three lines typed in to your command prompt (you can do it through the Windows GUI too, but its easier this way).

First though, before we can execute anything you need the command prompt. And while this tutorial works for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, but there are two different ways of getting to the command prompt with the privileges we need.

Windows XP

1. Log into the computer with a user that has administrative privileges (most accounts do, so if you’re not sure just use the account you normally log in with).
2. Click on Start -> Run
3. Type “cmd” in the run box and click OK

Windows Vista & 7

1. Click on the start orb and type “command” in the search box
2. Once you see command prompt in the list of results, right-click on it and select “Run as Administrator“
3. You will likely be prompted for an administrator confirmation, or a password. Type your password or click Continue.

Clear the Print Que

Now that you’re at the command prompt, simply type these three commands to clear everything out of the que.

NET STOP spooler
DEL %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\spool\PRINTERS\* /Q
NET START spooler

Tada! Your printer can go back to printing now.

What does it do?

I’m glad you asked, its always good to know whats going on before you blindly type things in. Here’s whats going on. There is a service (a program that runs the background all the time) called the print spooler (or just spooler). Its job is to take print jobs from programs and send them to the printer. When you print something from a program like Word the spooler service creates two temporary files in %System32%\spool\PRINTERS and if everything is running well, it then sends this file over whatever connection the computer as to the printer (USB, Parallel or TCP/IP).

Sometimes though (more often than it should) the spooler service gets stuck on one of these temporary files. and it gums up the process. unfortunately though if you try to just delete the files Windows wont let you because they are in use by the spooler service. So the above commands tell Windows to close the spooler service (which releases the files), then we delete all the files that are in the print que, and finally we start the spooler service back up so we can continue printing.

Updated March, 2011 for Window 7