Helping customers fix their printer queue (printer won't print) issue

[+Warwagon MVC]

A quick guide to help customers 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.

net stop spooler
del C:\windows\system32\spool\printers\*.* /q
net start spooler

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 all their print jobs should be flushed and they should be able to print again.

Hope it helps.

Edited October 6, 2009 by warwagon

[Chr1zt1an]

Thanks for the tip !

[HammyJ]

Cheers for that tip, I'm constantly getting calls from customers regarding their printer doing nothing!

[sglsg]

Many thanks for the tip.

[Fred Derf Veteran]

Of course, the user could just reboot their computer. The advantage to this batch file is that it is quicker.

[Chsoriano]

Not a bad batch file... I've been walking people through those steps for years. It is nice that Microsoft finally put a quick fix for that in Windows 7 though.

[sibot]

Thanks for the tip!

Not a bad batch file... I've been walking people through those steps for years. It is nice that Microsoft finally put a quick fix for that in Windows 7 though.

What fix would that be? :)

[Gixmi]

bundle of thanks for useful tips. :)

[jamesclarke555]

It's just as easy to do this remotely from your own workstation, plus allowing standard users on the network to run bat/cmd files is a massive no no!

[Breakthrough]

Very nice batchfile... I can see myself using this!

Thanks!

[Chuckelmonkey]

Thanks mate; I've got a friend who has been in need of something like this for ages!