Print jobs in Windows can sometimes fail to print and remain in an error status, which might prevent new print jobs from executing.
The “see what is printing” window usually shows the jobs that failed to execute, but in most cases will prevent you from clearing them. It usually is beause another user has created the print job, unfortunately, this will likely prevent other users from printing a new document as well.
The easiest way to solve this is to manually clear the print jobs and restart Windows Print Spooler
What is the Windows print spooler? #
The print spooler is a Windows system executable that centralize and manages the printing process. Management of printing involves retrieving the location of the correct printer driver, loading that driver, spooling high-level function calls into a print job, scheduling the print job for printing, and so on.
What is a print job? #
A Print job is a document waiting to be printing, alonside specific instructions (metadata) for the printing (numer of pages, user, layout…). It is put into a the print queue of a specific printer until it is picked up by the spooler and sent to the printer.
On Windows, print jobs are saved as files that will be deleted once the printing is done.
How to clear print jobs stuck in the printer spooler manually #
Stop the print spooler service #
To clear the print jobs from the spooler, you first need to stop the spooler service.
Click Start, type services, and open the services window (choose Run as administrator).
In the services window, look for the service Print Spooler on the left hand side pane.
Open the properties window (double-click), and in the General tab, click on the Stop button in the bottom command bar.
Remove all files (print jobs) from the spooler folder #
Open explorer and navigate to this location:
C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS
Select all the files in the folder (manual selection or CTRL+A), then press on the delete icon or right-click and choose Delete in the menu.
Start the print spooler service #
Now that all the print jobs have been deleted, we need to restart the spooler for it to take effet.
To do so, open the services window again, find the service Print spooler, open the properties window, and this time click on Start.
The spooler will start immediately, all failing print jobs will be cleared, and if you had queued documents, these will be sent to the spooler and start printing.
How to clear print jobs stuck in the printer spooler with a batch file #
If this happens quite often, and you need to clear the spooler regulary, you can also create a batch file with the following commands to automate the process.
net stop spooler
del /Q /F /S "%windir%\System32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*"
net start spooler
