One of the most frequent reasons why the printer does not print is the blocking of the printing process which leaves one or more documents in the queue and prevents new ones from being printed. This problem may depend on an error on that particular file that you wanted to print or on a blockage due to too many quick clicks on the print button.
The printing process, in fact, takes over the printing command given by the user and proceeds with the operation by printing one file at a time, putting the following ones in the queue.
If then, out of impatience or haste, you press the print button several times without waiting for the file to be processed and before you hear the printer's gears move, it can stop and hang or print the same document over and over again with waste of sheets and ink.
The first solution that can come to mind to deal with this problem is to turn off the printer and turn it on again, which however is useless because the print queue remains in memory.
To avoid this type of problem, when you accidentally request an unwanted print from the PC or if it remains blocked, you need to know how to cancel and delete a print and delete this queue in Windows 7, 8, and 10 .
The print queue is nothing more than the list of documents that appears by pressing the left mouse button on the small printer icon next to the clock.
It includes files that are yet to be processed and printed.
The first way to cancel the pending or blocked prints is, therefore, to press on one of the files with the right key and then on delete .
Another way to get to this window is to open, from the Start menu, search for Devices and Printers, then press the right mouse button on our printer icon and then on " View printing in progress " to see the print queue and all printer jobs in progress.
From the print queue window, you can also right-click on an empty space and then click on " delete all documents ".
However, it can happen that the file does not disappear and remains in the queue even by pressing delete because there is an error in the printing process, called the print spooler .
Restarting the print spooler is therefore the first step in resolving stuck print errors, in order to cancel the documents currently waiting and empty the print queue.
To stop the Print Spooler service and eliminate the temporary cache that Windows uses for printer jobs manually, you should open the Windows Services section.
Then open the Start menu, type the word " services " and open the Services program or, from the Run box of the Start menu, type and run the services.msc command.
In the right pane of the Services window, find and double click on the " print spooler " service to open the properties window.
In the " General " tab, click on the " Stop " button.
Without closing the print spooler tab, now open Windows Explorer and the % windir% \ System32 \ spool \ PRINTERS folder inside which there are the files in the print queue that can now be deleted manually as you would any file .
After deleting everything from this folder, you can restart the print spooler by pressing the Start button on the services tab.
To make this procedure faster and automatic, you can create a small batch file.
Then press on the empty space of the desktop to create a new text document.
Inside write
net stop spooler
del / Q / F / S "% windir% \ System32 \ spool \ PRINTERS \ *. *"
net start spooler
And save the file on the desktop by pressing on File> Save As, writing as name "cancel_print.bat" and below pressing on Save as> All files .
At this point, to obtain the same result as the procedure illustrated above and to delete all the files that were waiting to be printed, you must right-click on the file annulla_stampa.bat and run it as administrator.
In some printers, such as HP and Epson, you can also cancel the print jobs in progress by pressing the Stop or Stop button, which usually has a red cross design.
A good free free program to manage the printer and the documents to be printed and also to eliminate the print queues, is Print Service Manager which works with almost all printer models.
In a previous article we saw how to save ink and cartridges, especially when printing a website, avoiding to also include images and colored advertisements.
