All of the sudden, XP will not communicate with the printer. Or any printer for that matter! I can see that there are a bunch of print jobs in the queue. When I try to cancel the print jobs, nothing happens. I’m stuck and need to print. HELP!
OK lets not freak out and pull an office space…It looks like your print spooler crashed out (Edit: no this is nothing like pc load letter). This can happen for a variety of reasons. Corrupted print job and software crash are among some of the possible reasons. Most of the time this can be resolved by restarting the print spooler service. This will clear out your Queue and reconnect you to the printer. I always physically restart the printer if possible and then follow these steps:
Start and stop the print spooler by following these steps:
- Open Computer Management.
- In the details pane, double-click Print Spooler.
- Do one of the following depending on the task you want to do:
- Click Stop to stop the service.
- Click Start to start the service.
This should have you back up and printing in no time. For the more advanced Admin, you can do this from the command line with the following commands.
net start spooler
Yup the net command has either a start or stop option and it will do just that to any service you know the name of – wildcards work as well!
What do you guys do to solve printer issues – local or networked?
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Karl Asked:
What do you guys do to solve printer issues – local or networked?
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Here’s what I do…check out if it is network problems, server problems, or workstation problems. If neither, reboot the printer…if that don’t work…..
Call Xerox…that’s what we pay our expensive leases for! :D
Print spooler restart for sure. I have also seen where the print jobs don’t delete even after stopping and restarting the spooler. In that case I stop the spooler, then browse to %systemroot%\system32\spool\PRINTERS and delete any items in there, then start the spooler again.
This happens to me at work a lot. I just created a batch file to automate it:
net stop spooler
del C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.* /q /f
net start spooler
Viola! One double click usually does the trick.
This happens to me at work a lot. I just created a batch file to automate it:
net stop spooler
del C:WINDOWSsystem32spoolPRINTERS*.* /q /f
net start spooler
Viola! One double click usually does the trick.
@Christopher – you just tripled my productivity. :)
@Christopher – you just tripled my productivity. :)