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Cancelling those stuck print jobs in Windows 7

Intro
This is information I assembled from a couple different sources. Sometimes you view your print queue, a job’s not printing for whatever reason, you delete it, it shows cancelled, but won’t go away. Am I right? Here’s what you can do short of rebooting (which I object to as the cure for everything on philosophical grounds).

The rough outline
You’re gonna have to stop the spooler, delete the spooled files and re-start the spooler.

The details
– Launch a CMD window by typing CMD in the run menu.
– right-click on the cmd icon that pops up, choose the option run as administrator
– in that window type:

net stop spooler

You should see this output:

The Print Spooler service is stopping.
The Print Spooler service was stopped successfully.

– In Windows Explorer navigate to the folder

c:\windows\system32\spool\PRINTERS

– delete all the files you find there – those are your stuck print jobs
– back in your CMD window type:

net start spooler

You should see:

The Print Spooler service is starting.
The Print Spooler service was started successfully.

That’s it! If you re-launch your print queue view you should no longer see your stuck print jobs.

Conclusion
Annoyed by my own inability to delete print jobs I researched a time-saving way to do it without a dreaded reboot. Here I share what I’ve learned.

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