How to clear a printer print queue: a few simple ways

Probably, many users faced the problem, when you try to print a document or image to the printer, printing is impossible. The printer's LED flashes, signaling that the process is about to start, but nothing happens. It does not lead to anything and resending the document to print. Then the question arises as to how to clear the print queue of the printer. In the following, a few simple ways will be presented.

Printer print queue: why fail?

The reasons for the printer "hanging" can be completely different - from the banal voltage drop in the power grid to the failures associated with the incorrectly installed drivers.

In part, this type of failure can be attributed to too many documents in the queue (especially not local, but network printers), too long waiting times set in the printer settings, problems with the print service itself, and so on. But somehow this problem needs to be solved? Next, consider how to clean up the print queue of a Windows 7 printer or any other system. What OS is used, does not matter in principle.

How to Clean a Printer Print Queue: The Easiest Ways

When the document is sent to print, the printer icon appears in the system tray. If there is a cross on the icon, the system may be referring to an inaccessible or missing printer. It will need to be reinstalled in the appropriate computer settings.

In the case when everything is OK, but the print does not start, click on the icon and bring up a menu where in the "Printer" section from the list of actions select the line for clearing the list or canceling printing of a separate document. Usually it helps, but not always.

In the event that the system signals that there is no document in the queue (the printer list is empty), but the printer does not return to its original state (the LED still blinks), you just need to reboot the system, which usually everyone does. However, in this case, when restarting, printing starts in normal mode. That is, the user does not purge the queue, but deletes the temporary files of the printer.

Deleting Print Files

In the case where you need to solve the problem of how to clean up the printer print queue Windows 10, you can do something different. Manual intervention is required.

First, in the "Task Manager" process tree, you need to shut down the print services (spooler.exe and spoolsv.exe), and then delete the temporary printer files with the .spl and .shd extensions that are located in the Printer folder of the Spool directory, which in turn Is located in the System32 directory of the Windows system folder.

Force Restart of the Print Service

In the question of how to clean up the printer print queue, there is one more solution, although it is more complicated. In this case, you need to call the services section (the services.msc command in the "Run" menu), find there "Print Manager" and from the right click menu select the stop line.

Then, turn off the printer power, pull out the power cord and wait for about 60 seconds, then turn the device back on. 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 the quotes).

Here it will be necessary to write down the following sequence:

In principle, this set of commands is an analog of restarting the "Print Manager" while simultaneously deleting the temporary files of the printer.

What can I use in addition?

If all the above described methods seem to someone difficult or do not give the desired effect, you can use third-party utilities, among which the most interesting is the HP Print and Scan Doctor program.

The application is able to automatically detect and correct some printer errors. As a rule, after the process of processing failures, most printers begin to work in the normal mode.

If, for some reason, the printer does not respond to requests after that, you can re-install or update the device driver, temporarily disable the brandamer or log in under another account and print the required documents.

Instead of the 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's best to simply reboot the system, because after restarting the printing usually begins, as if nothing had happened. In extreme cases, you can use a coercive restart of the print service and the removal of temporary files (for this, the command line is optimal, since you do not have to rummage through the services and look for files in Explorer).