Clearing A Document Stuck In The Print Queue

We’ve all experienced those times when we have have sent a document to the printer, but for one reason or another it has failed to print. Usually once the problem is corrected, the job will print as normal and everything is good, but occasioanlly the job gets stuck in the print queue and not only blocks anything else from being printed, it also refuses to be removed from the print queue by the normal methods.

Help is at hand, and the job can be easily removed from the print queue (along with any other jobs in it) quite quickly and easily.

First click on the Start button, then right click on ‘My Computer‘ and select ‘Manage‘ from the context menu, where you will see the screen below

Now double click on the ‘Services and applications‘ option in the right hand pane.

When the screen changes, double click on the ‘Services‘ option in the right hand pane,  where you will now see a list of all the services running on your machine.

Scroll down to the service called ‘Print Spooler‘ and click once to highlight it, then just to the left, click the option ‘Stop the service‘, and you will see its status change from ‘Started’ to ‘Stopped‘.

Once you have done this, highlight the service again, and click the ‘Restart the service‘ option and your print queue should be all cleared.

Note – The instructions and screen shots above are from Windows XP, the procedure is the same for Windows Vista, And Windows 7, the screen shots may be slightly different but it will be obvious where the important features are.