How to Clear the Print Queue in Windows?


Have you ever been in a situation where you try to print but nothing happens? You wait for the job to get printed, but it doesn’t! There is a lot of reasons why print jobs don’t get printed, but one of the most common causes is that the printer queue has a stuck print job.

This can happen for several reasons. Let us say that you tried to print something a few hours back, but the printer was off. You ended up not needing the document and forgot about it. You come back and try to print again. The print job is added to the queue and, if the earlier job didn’t get removed automatically, the new one will be stuck behind that job that never got printed.

Sometimes, you can manually open the queue and delete the print job, but sometimes you cannot. In this case, you must clear the print queue manually. This article will walk you through the steps needed to clear the print queue.

 

Clearing the Print Queue in Windows

To get the printing services running again, do the following:

  1. Go to Start, Control Panel, and Administrative Tools. Double-click the services icon.
  2. Scroll down to the Print Spooler service, right-click on it and select Stop. To do this, you must be logged in as an Administrator. At this point, no one will be able to print anything on any of the printers that are hosted on this server.
  3. Next, you need to go to the following directory: C:\WINDOWS\System32\spool\PRINTERS.

This will clear all print queues (if you do this on a server, it is a good idea to first make sure no other printing jobs are being processed on any other printer on the server because performing this step will delete these jobs as well).

  • Now, you can return to the Services console, right-click and choose Start for the Print Spooler service.

At this point, you should be able to print trouble-free. If you prefer to use a script, i.e. for a server, you can create a batch file with the commands below or simply type them into the command prompt:

  • net stop Spooler
  • del%systemroot%\System32\spool\printers\*/Q/F/S
  • net start spooler

The first and third commands are quite obvious: they stop and start the print spooler service.

 

Conclusion

When you print a document or image, Windows places the document or image in a queue called the print queue. In short, the print queue is nothing but the list of documents waiting to print.

Windows 10 automatically clears the print queue when the printer completes all pending jobs.

But sometimes you may need to manually clear the print queue to resolve a stuck print job.

Category: Printer
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