Subscriber Jerry Munn wrote this week to ask about a problem where he couldn’t print from his Windows XP computer.
Also, can you tell me where to go to restart my printer spooler. We had several power failures this weekend and I no longer have any printer info on one of my computers. When I try to reinstall the printer drivers I get a message that I need to restart my printer spooler. I cannot do this. Help if you can.Thanks,
Jerry Munn
The Windows Print Spooler is a Windows XP “Service”. You can start it via the following steps:
- Click on the Start button
- click on Run
- enter “services.msc” without the quotes and press Enter
- Scroll down to Print Spooler
- Single-Click on Print Spooler
-
The details will open in the middle of the window.
- It probably shows Start — if so, Start it.
- If it shows Stop and Restart, I suggest Stop it, then Start it.
I received a followup email from Jerry…
Terry,Thanks for the news letter and info on restarting my print spooler. I followed the steps outlined, however, I received the following error message. “Could not start the print spooler on local computer. Error 1068. He dependency service or group failed to start.” What next? You may email me back at [email address removed].
Thanks
Jerry Munn
My initial answer to Jerry was that he should go to the same place, double-click on Print Spooler instead of single clicking.
Click on the Dependency tab.
You’ve managed to disable some Windows service is required for the Print Spooler.
Sounds like you’ve been making changes to services based on some security lists on the Internet. They may be right, but only within the parameters that the author wants to consider. Often, you’ll find that something you like to do no longer works. Murphy’s Law.
In this case, it’s the Remote Procedure Call service.
Upon further communication with Jerry, it turns out that he had two services on which the print spooler service depended. One was the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service. The other was a service installed by his Lexmark printer. He checked it and changed it to automatically start — and all was well.
and
i found ur site very useful for common Computer User, who don’t have specific Technical knowladge .
Keep it Up
Best of Luck
Jeetendra Goswami
my print spooler stoped automaticaly when a network system use my sharing printer how it will be fixed?
I’ve tried everything over the years and none of methods worked. I finally figured it out.
Open the notepad and copy and paste below command:
net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\*.spl
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\*.shd
net start spooler
Now save it as DeletePrintJobs.cmd in the desktop or anyother location and whenever you want to cancel the print operation just double click on the file now you can see the commands executing in command prompt and it exits after automatically deleting the print queues
1. now right click the print job in the printing process folder and click cancel.
2. now run DeletePrintJobs.cmd
3. then right click the print job in the printing process folder and click cancel.
BOOM!!! it’s gone!!
Excellent article about the print spool issue! It helped me with one system I had but on another one I had to troubleshoot wasn’t as easy! Luckily I used the utility from http://www.printerproblemsolver.com and it helped fix my other issues! It also takes care of print spool stuff too, but I found it afterwards lol
Again, great article!