There are numerous cases where documents are stuck in the printing queue which prevents other documents from being printed. There are a lot of different reasons for your printer queue to get stuck and not get deleted. Sometimes the job gets shown as ‘pending’ while nothing is going on or sometimes the queue just gets stuck as is.
What causes the Printer Queue to get Stuck?
Like mentioned before, there are several different reasons why your printer queue might get stuck and go in a not responding state. Some of the reasons are but not limited to: Before we dive right into the solutions, make sure that you have a valid internet connection between the printer and your computer. Also, your printer must be working properly without any errors whatsoever. The solutions listed will help clear your printer queue but it may get stuck again if your printer is not configured properly.
Method 1: Restarting and Clearing Print Spooler
Print Spooler is the software component which manages all of your printer jobs. It has a list which contains all the documents sent to be printed. It even shows the current status of each job by fetching information from the printer. In the majority of the cases, the issue is solved by restarting and clearing the Print Spooler. There are two ways through which you can restart and clear your print spooler. You can try out the manual one before moving on to the automatic.
Restarting Spooler Manually
Here we will first close the spooler service and then attempt at deleting all the jobs present at the spooler folder. Make sure that you are logged in as an administrator on your computer. Permission might be needed to access the following folder. If prompted, press Continue.
Restarting Spooler Automatically (.bat file)
If clearing and restarting the spooler service fixed the issue for you and you think you have to perform this action more than one time, you can download the batch file linked below. This will automatically stop the spooler service, delete the print queue, and start the spooler service again. Make sure that you are logged in as an administrator to perform this action. Note: You can also kill the spooler service if the normal method doesn’t work for you. Navigate to the processes in your task manager and end the service ‘spoolsv.exe’. Press Windows + R, type ‘spoolsv.exe’ in the dialogue box and press Enter. Now try printing again. You also may need to toggle the display of ‘hidden items’ from File explorer settings in order to see the contents of the spooler folder.
Solution 2: Power cycling your Printer
There are several instances where because of the printer being in an error state, the printer spooler fails to clear successfully. This is a very common scenario and is usually fixed with power cycling your printer. Power cycling is an act of completely shutting down a device so all its temporary configurations are erased. This helps in getting a device out of an error state.
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