Have you ever run into the situation where you try to print something and nothing happens? You wait for it to print, but the job doesn’t go through? There are a ton of reasons why a print job may not actually print, but one of the common causes is that the printer queue has a stuck print job.

This can happen for a number of reasons. Let’s say you tried to print something a few hours back, but the printer was off. You ended up not needing the document and you forgot about it. Then you come back and try to print. The print job is added to the queue and if the previous job didn’t get removed automatically, it will be behind that print job that never got printed.

Sometimes you can manually go in and delete the print job, but sometimes you just can’t get rid of it! In this type of case, you have to clear the print queue manually. In this article, I’ll show you the steps to clear the print queue.

Everyone should know how to clear the print queue in Windows when all the jobs get “stuck” and none of the jobs can be deleted. This will save you from having to restart a server (which is bad!).

Clear Print Queue in Windows

In order to get the printing services back up and running, follow these steps:

1. Go to Start, Control Panel and Administrative Tools. Double click on Services icon.

2. Scroll down to the Print Spooler service and right click on it and select Stop. In order to do this, you need to be logged in as Administrator. At this point, no one will be able to print anything on any of the printers that are being hosted on this server.

3. Next you need to go to the following directory: C:\WINDOWS\System32\spool\PRINTERS. Delete all the files in this folder. This will clear all print queues (it’s a good idea to first make sure there are no other print jobs being processed on any of the other printers on the server because doing this step will delete those jobs also).

4. Now you can go back to the Services console and right-click and choose Start for the Print Spooler service!

You can also go to a command prompt and type net stop spooler or net start spooler to start and stop the service. Enjoy!