Hoffman
Addict
- Joined
- Jun 1, 2007
- Messages
- 284
A quick guide to help people fix a problem with their printer queue being jammed up and not printing.
Ah…! “The Great Printer Queue Problem”. It's an issue for which I receive a lot of phone calls. The customer goes to print and nothing happens. They try to cancel the print job only to get the common "deleting" message. But it just sits there and never deletes. The best fix for this is to manually stop the printer spooler, delete all the files out of the spool/printers directory and then start the spooler back up. It is an issue that can turn into a lengthy phone conversation with the “computer ignorant” and, unfortunately, it's only good for that one time. Next time they have to do it all over again. When I'm at their house for this specific problem, I put a very simple script on their desktop to easily correct the problem should it ever happen again.
This batch file is VERY simple yet very effective.
Just copy the code into a notepad document and save it out as a bat file. I like to call it printer fix.bat and put it on their desktop.
If the user is running Vista or Windows 7 you will have to inform them right click the file and run it as an administrator. Because I don't think you can set bat files to automatically run as admins.
After they run that file the print jobs should be flushed and you should be able to print again.
Ah…! “The Great Printer Queue Problem”. It's an issue for which I receive a lot of phone calls. The customer goes to print and nothing happens. They try to cancel the print job only to get the common "deleting" message. But it just sits there and never deletes. The best fix for this is to manually stop the printer spooler, delete all the files out of the spool/printers directory and then start the spooler back up. It is an issue that can turn into a lengthy phone conversation with the “computer ignorant” and, unfortunately, it's only good for that one time. Next time they have to do it all over again. When I'm at their house for this specific problem, I put a very simple script on their desktop to easily correct the problem should it ever happen again.
This batch file is VERY simple yet very effective.
Just copy the code into a notepad document and save it out as a bat file. I like to call it printer fix.bat and put it on their desktop.
If the user is running Vista or Windows 7 you will have to inform them right click the file and run it as an administrator. Because I don't think you can set bat files to automatically run as admins.
After they run that file the print jobs should be flushed and you should be able to print again.
