Fastest way to clear stuck printing jobs is to download this batch file I created, just download it and open it and it will do it for you automatically.
Did you ever had a job on your printer queue that just couldn’t be deleted? I find that this happens quite frequently with shared network printers on Windows networks. You have to manually clean out the spool folder.
First things first, you will need to do this on the computer which is sharing the printers to the rest of the network. It’s usually going to be the computer to which the printer is attached, or the local File & Printer sharing server. If you do this on the wrong computer it won’t work.
Once you locate the machine that handles the printer sharing, you need to stop the print spooling service. Otherwise we won’t be able to clean out the hanging jobs. This is the service that accepts printing jobs, queues them up, and sends them to the printer. Note that once you stop this service no one on your network will be able to print to the printer in question. Of course since you have a stuck job in there, no one can print anyway so it should not be a big issue. Also note that you will loose all queued jobs if you do this. Here is how you do this:
Pull up your Run box (Windows Key+R) type in cmd and hit Enter. This will bring you to the MS DOS prompt. There type in the following:
net stop spooler
You should get a message saying the spooler stopped successfully. Now we need to clean out the spool folder. This is where windows keeps jobs that haven’t been printed yet.
Call up your Run box again (Windows Key+R) and type in the following:
%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\spool\PRINTERS
This should open a new explorer window. You are likely to see bunch of files in there – some of which may be classified as “Shockwave Objects” by windows. They are actually not Shockwave files but whatever. We don’t care because we will be deleting them. Just remove everything you can see that folder and then close the window. If you can’t delete some of the files, it means that you didn’t stop the spooler properly. Go back and try it again.
This deletes all the jobs on the queue, so you might need to re-send some of the documents that got stuck there waiting. Once the folder is empty go back to your DOS prompt and type in:
net start spooler
Your printer queue should be clean now. If it’s not, you probably did something wrong.
Please note that if you look in your Printers and Faxes folder before you issue the start spoolercommand you will find that all your printers are missing. Don’t panic – this is normal. They will come back once you start the spooler service.
Alternatively you can use the following batch script:
@echo off
net stop spooler
del /F %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*
net start spooler
Copy the lines above, paste them into notepad and save it as a .bat or .cmd file. Then just double click to run it when your printer gets stuck.