Cancelling a printing job

One of the most frustrating things when it comes to dealing with computers, are printers. These can be very expensive  yet annoying to use and they can make it very hard to cancel a printing job.

One of the advantages of being a programmer is that you have a better understanding of how computers work, and can find your way around one easier. This turns you from a consumer who is stuck with the way things are, to a producer who can change things to his or her liking.

Below is a convenient way to cancel those stubborn printing jobs. This will stop the print spooler service, delete the spooled files, and then restart the print spooler service.

Simply run the following commands. You can also create a batch file to do this for you, by pasting these commands into a text file and saving it with the extension .cmd.


net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
net start spooler

Reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946737