Documents Not Printing – Stuck In Print Queue

The most frequent problem with printers (apart from the ridiculous cost of ink!) is when documents are not printing because adocument gets ‘stuck’ in the print queue – meaning that it won’t print out. You will not receive an error message but the status of the document in the print queue will stay as ‘printing’ forever and never actually print.

Can’t I Just Delete The Document?

You should certainly try this first but often it will not work – the ‘stuck’ document will change to ‘deleting in progress’ but never actually delete. Until it is deleted properly no further documents can be printed because they are in a queue (the first job submitted must be printed before any subsequent jobs can progress) – so if you keep on trying to print more documents to ‘test things’ you will just end up with loads of print jobs queued up…

How To Fix It

The fix is simple – you need to clear the print queue manually so that all the print jobs currently in the queue are deleted properly – once the queue is empty you should then be able to print new documents without problems. We will show you how below, depending on whether you use XP or Vista/7:

1. XP – click ‘Start’ then click ‘Run’ and in the Run window type CMD then press ‘OK’ – this opens a Command Prompt window. Now skip to Step 3

2. Vista/7 – click ‘Start’ and type Command in the search box. Right click on the ‘Command Prompt’ result in the search results above it and select ‘Run As Administrator’ – this opens a Command Prompt window

3. All version of Windows – in the Command Prompt window:

4. Type net stop spooler then press the Enter key

5. Type del %windir%\system32\spool\printers\*.* /q then press the Enter key (Note: the only spaces in this command are a single space between del and %, and a single space between * and /q)

6. Type net start spooler then press the Enter key

7. Type exit then press the Enter key to exit the Command Prompt window

This should have cleared the print queue (i.e. all print jobs have been deleted) and you can now submit new jobs for printing.

Posted by http://techlogon.com