How to delete or force delete print jobs

• Written by Ellie under Geek Girl

We have all sent print jobs to the printer to only realize – “I shouldn’t have sent that!” But when you right-click on the job and press delete, the job says “Deleting” but never goes away! The only way I knew of to fix this was to restart my computer. But, that’s a huge pain when I have four or five programs open and working online, too! Follow the directions below to manually force delete print jobs. You won’t have to reboot your computer afterwards, either!

1. Browse to Start > Run… and type in “NET STOP SPOOLER” – this will stop the print spooler service. (In Vista, you can just type this in the Search box; and when testing, the next two steps were unnecessary; however, try them anyway!)
2. Browse to your Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS folder
3. You should see files there ending in .SPL and .SHD created around the time you tried to print – delete these files.
4. Browse to Start -> Run… and type in “NET START SPOOLER” (this will restart the print spooler service)
5. Double click the printer icon in the lower-right corner of your taskbar to examine your print job queue and browse to View > Refresh.