How to Clear Pending Documents From Printer

I’m trying to delete a document in the queue of my printer, but I can’t. It writes “deleting”, simply information technology never finishes. I’ve tried to abolish the same document from the field of my printer but information technology doesn’t disappear. Restarting my reckoner, restarting the document, turning off the printer, unplugging the cables, still I can’t. What else can I do? It doesn’t permit other documents to print!

This happens too ofttimes, and you’d think Windows would have figured out how to handle it by now.

When you print a certificate, it’due south not sent directly to your printer. Instead, information technology gets placed in a queue. Once in the queue, Windows comes along and notices something needs to exist printed, and sends it to the printer.

The problem is that sometimes the queue gets “stuck”, for lack of a better word.

It can be really, really frustrating. It’s besides easy to ready.

Why queue?

You can run many applications on your computer at the same time, and they could all effort to impress at the same time. Without some kind of organization, that could exist a mess. We want the documents printed in sequence, one after the other.

Windows handles this past creating what’due south called a print queue. When an awarding prints a document, it’south placed into the queue of documents to be printed. Multiple programs can print to the queue at the same fourth dimension; Windows keeps track of which pages belong to which document.

When the printer is ready — perchance after having completed printing a prior certificate — the next certificate in the queue is printed. The consequence is an orderly print-out of each document, one after the other.

Spoolers and queues

Each printer on your system has its own print queue, managed by the organisation “Print Spooler” service. The procedure of adding a document to the queue, or sending it to the printer from the queue, is referred to as “spooling.”

1

You can view the print queue for each printer by opening the Settings app (or Control Console, in prior Windows versions), and locatingPrinters & scanners or
Devices and Printers.
Click on your printer in the listing and click on
Manage
(in prior versions of Windows, you might need to double-click on the icon corresponding to your printer). Hither’south the impress queue for my (paused) printer after press the Ask Leo!

Print doesn’t print, Abolish doesn’t cancel

If the document being printed isn’t listed, you tin can’t cancel it. Many printers accept very big buffers and take received several pages, or the entire document, earlier they’re done printing. This means the document might be removed from the Windows impress queue well before all the pages are printed.

But this question is really about the opposite: what do y’all do when the printer
should
exist printing, the impress queue shows several documents ready to be printed, and yet … nothing’southward happening?

First, bank check all the “usual” stuff. Is the printer continued and powered on? Is the printer out of paper? Is it complaining about some other kind of fault? Is in that location a newspaper jam?  There are a lot of things that can finish a printer from press, and nine times out of x, it’southward i of those issues that gets in the way.

And even so, sometimes non.

Clearing the print queue

Yous may be faced with this situation:

• Your printer is confirmed ready to print.
• You have documents in the impress queue.
• Nothing is printing, even though it looks like something should.
• Attempting to cancel the current print job in the queue does nothing.
• Even rebooting doesn’t help.

The solution is to clear the print queue manually, removing all the documents waiting to exist printed. This is washed on the computer to which the printer is connected.

• Turn off your printer.
• Right-click on the Windows Outset menu in Windows 10 (in prior versions,Calculator in the Offset Menu) or theMy Computer icon (on your desktop). And then click
  Reckoner Management, or justManage.
• In the resulting dialog, expand
  Services and Applications
  (by clicking the “greater than” sign to its left), and click on
  Services. Roll down the resulting list to detectPrint Spooler.
• Right-click on
  Print Spooler
  and click on
  Backdrop.
• Click on
  Stop
  to finish the print spooler. (Exit this dialog open up.)
• At present, use Windows Explorer to navigate to the binder “
  c:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS”
  
  
  
  
  two
  
   T
  his is the folder containing the print queue.
• Delete the contents of this folder.
• Render to the Printer Spooler Properties dialog and click onStart.
• Turn your printer back on.
• Print something.

If your printing problem was related to a stuck printer queue, you should now be able to print once again.

Pro Tip: The control line

Honestly, I never do what I’ve simply described when my printer queue is “stuck”. I run the following commands from an authoritative command prompt:

net finish spooler del /Q %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.* net commencement spooler

The command prompt must be run “as ambassador”, since it requires administrative privileges to admission the print queue binder.

If it happens frequently enough, you might even salvage those commands to a command file.