Thursday, June 12, 2008

How to delete or cancel hung print jobs in Windows

How to clear the print queue in Windows when all the jobs get “stuck” and none of the jobs can be deleted.

It's easy enough to cancel a print job in the queue - you simply right-click it and select "cancel," after which the print job status commences to display "deleting..." After which you normally expect the print job to cancel and disappear so you can resume printing, correct? Unfortunately, often the print job will hang and prevent you from continuing to print anew from that same printer.

How to forcefully delete print job

1. Go to Start, Control Panel and Administrative Tools. Double click on Services icon.

2. Scroll down to the Print Spooler service and right click on it and select Stop. In order to do this, you need to be logged in as Administrator. At this point, no one will be able to print anything on any of the printers that are being hosted on this server.

3. Next you need to go to the following directory: C:\WINDOWS\System32\spool\PRINTERS. Delete all the files in this folder. This will clear all print queues (it’s a good idea to first make sure there are no other print jobs being processed on any of the other printers on the server because doing this step will delete those jobs also)

4. Now you can go back to the Services console and right-click and choose Start for the Print Spooler service.

You can also go to a command prompt and type net stop spooler or net start spooler to start and stop the service.

Source: http://community.contractwebdevelopment.com/how-delete-or-cancel-hung-print-jobs-windows

2 comments:

Annar said...

that is great for a server hosting only the one problem queue...what about print servers that have 50-100 queues all using the same spooler service?

Nishant Kumar said...

Use Unlocker (http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/) to delete selected print queue files without stopping print spooler service.