Whenever you send commands to your printer to print certain documents and/or files, it stores these documents in a queue and the software that helps handle that task is called the Print Spooler.
It is not rare that a print spooler gets stuck due to many reasons and you might need to clear your print spooler.
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Why do print jobs get stuck in the queue?
Usually due to a slow computer hardware, poor network connection, power fluctuations and/or incompatible printer, your print spooler might unexpectedly get jammed and the print jobs stuck in the queue.
For some cases, a printer connected to a network might get stuck due to many commands sent to it and you need to clear your print spooler because of the many commands it cannot run at once.
When this happens, you might not be sure of when your print spooler shall restore and restart the printing commands you sent to it. At certain points, you even might want to cancel the commands in case of changes you want to implement in your document.
How to clear a print spooler in Windows 10 and Windows 8
There is a quick and easy way you can clear your print spooler from your computer’s settings.
- Click on the start menu at the right corner of your PC
- Type RUN and press Enter
- Type “services.msc” and press Enter
- In the folder which opens up, click on Print Spooler as shown below
- Click on Restart the services on the left (as below)
When you do this, the Print Spooler shall be cleared and you can give it other commands
How to clear a print spooler in Mac OS X
The process of clearing the print spooler in Mac OS X is as follows.
Go to System preferences
Go to Printers and Scanners
From there, there is an add (+) OR minus (-) button on the left down below the list of printers.
When you click on the minus button, all the jobs queued for that printer are removed.
NOTE: The minus button doesn’t remove the printer from your Printer’s registry BUT just removes the TASKS that were queued on the printer.
While you finish clearing your print spooler, you might as well want to restart it so it works faster.
How to manually delete a printer from Registry in Windows
Incase you want to completely get rid of a printer from your registry (probably it was removed from the network or you no longer want to connect to it), here is how to.
This can be done via RegEditor
- Click on the start menu on the right corner of your PC
- Type RUN and press Enter.
- Type regedit
- Go to the directory: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Connections
- From the list of printers you find, you can DELETE them therefore they are removed from your printer registry.
