Probably, many users have encountered a problem when it is impossible to print when they try to output a document or image to a printer. The printer LED blinks, indicating that the process seems to be about to begin, but nothing is happening. Re-sending the document for printing does not lead to anything. This raises the question of how to clear the print queue of the printer. Some simple ways will be given below.
Printer print queue: why crashes?
The reasons for the “freezing” of the printer can be completely different - from a banal voltage drop in the power supply to failures associated with incorrectly installed drivers.
Partially, this type of failure can include too many documents in the queue (especially for network printers rather than local ones), too long waiting times set in the printer settings, problems with the print service itself, etc. But somehow you need to solve this problem? Next, we’ll cover issues related to how to clear the print queue of a Windows 7 printer or any other system. What OS is used does not matter.
How to clear the printer print queue: the easiest ways
When a document is sent for printing, a printer icon appears in the system tray. If there is a cross on the icon, the system may refer to an inaccessible or missing printer. It will need to be reinstalled in the appropriate computer settings.
In the case when everything is fine, but printing does not start, click on the icon and call up the menu, where in the "Printer" section from the list of actions select the line to clear the list or cancel printing of a single document. This usually helps, but not always.
If the system signals that there are no documents in the queue (the printer list is empty), but the printer still does not return to its original state (the LED blinks anyway), you just need to reboot the system, which is usually what everyone does. True, in this case, when restarting, printing starts in normal mode. That is, the user does not clear the queue, but deletes temporary printer files.
Delete print files
In the case where you need to solve the problem of how to clear the print queue of a Windows 10 printer, you can do something else. Manual intervention required.
First, in the "Task Manager" process tree, you need to shut down the print services (spooler.exe and spoolsv.exe), and then delete temporary printer files with the .spl and .shd extensions, which are located in the Printer folder of the Spool directory, which in turn located in the System32 directory of the Windows system folder.
Force restart of the print service
There is another solution to the question of how to clear the printer print queue, although it is more complicated. In this option, you need to call the services section (services.msc command in the "Run" menu), find "Print Manager" there and select the stop line from the right-click menu.
Then, turn off the printer, unplug the power cord and wait about 60 seconds, and then turn on the device again. After that, in the same section, you can restart the corresponding service.
Actions through the command line
More advanced users can solve the problem of how to clear the printer print queue using the command line called from the "Run" console with the "cmd" command (without quotes).
Here you will need to write the following sequence:
In principle, this set of commands is an analogue of restarting the “Print Manager” while deleting temporary printer files.
What can be used additionally?
If all the above methods seem complicated to someone or do not give the desired effect, you can use third-party utilities, among which the HP Print and Scan Doctor program looks most interesting.
The application is able to automatically detect and correct some errors associated with printers. As a rule, at the end of the fault handling process, most printers start working normally.
If, for some reason, the printer still does not respond to requests, you can reinstall or update the device driver, temporarily disable the firewall or log into the system under a different account and print the necessary documents.
Instead of a total
In principle, any of the proposed methods has its pros and cons. However, in the simplest case, when you still need to print documents, but the printer does not work, it is best to just reboot the system, because after restarting, printing usually starts as if nothing had happened. In extreme cases, you can use the forced restart of the print service and the removal of temporary files together (the command line is optimal for this, since you don’t have to rummage through the services and search for files in Explorer).