Clearing a Fickle Printer Queue

Printers are a fickle thing. Honestly, they are my least favorite piece of hardware to troubleshoot. Often I come across a printer jam that is not actually a printer jam, but a jam of the printer queue. While canceling or deleting all the jobs from the queue does sometimes work, there are cases where a print job just will not go away.

To completely delete everything from the queue, follow these steps below.

1) Open a command prompt and enter: net stop spooler
2) Browse to C:\Windows\system32\spool\printers
3) Delete any file that you see in the folder from step two
4) Return to the command prompt and enter: net start spooler

After these four steps are completed, the queue should now be cleared and printing will (hopefully) resume.