How to Clear a Stalled Print Job from Memory in Windows

We have all experienced print jobs held up due to a piece of paper jammed in the printer, but what about a print job that never even makes it to the printer? It just may happen that one of your print jobs gets stuck in Windows’ printing queue, making it impossible to print at all. Any more jobs that you send through will sit on the end of the queue, behind the stalled job.

It seems like no matter what you do, you cannot get rid of the stalled print job. Pulling the plug on your printer does not help, since the print job is actually stuck in your computer’s memory rather than the printer’s. When you try to cancel the print job through the Control Panel, it refuses to budge. So what the heck are you supposed to do?

How to Clear Out a Stalled Print Job

In order to stop a stalled print job, perform the following steps in order:

1. Stop the Print Spooling service.
• Click Start.
• Click Run.
• Type cmd.
• Hit Enter.
• At the command prompt, type net stop spooler and hit the Enter key.
2. Delete the stalled print job.
• Open My Computer.
• Go to C:\Windows\system32\spool
• Delete any files you find in this folder (but do not delete any folders!).
• Go to C:\Windows\system32\spool\printers
• Delete any files you find in this folder (but do not delete any folders!).
3. Restart the Print Spooling service.
• Return to the command prompt used in step 1.
• Type net start spooler and hit the Enter key.

Once you have restarted the Print Spooler, the jammed print job will be cleared from memory. Now you can go back and re-print all the jobs that were held up.