In this case, we are only going to deal with the problem that the printer “won’t listen”, and not other possible problems like a paper jam or a lack of ink. Here you will quickly see the problem: you send documents to be printed and the printer does nothing; looking at the print manager in windows you will see that there is a document blocking others, with a print queue as long as the documents you have sent to print and they are not went out.
How to restart print service in Windows
These issues can usually be easily resolved by simply restarting the print service in Windows, but be aware that this may delete jobs you have submitted to the print manager, or if you have submitted the same job multiple times, it may print . say again. Therefore, it is advisable first of all to consult the print manager (you can do this by double-clicking on the printer icon which will appear in the taskbar) and to manually delete all the jobs by wait (right click, cancel).
Once the print queue is empty (as shown in the image above these lines), you can proceed to restart the print service without worrying that the printer will go crazy, deleting all the jobs you sent at once. .
To do this, you need to open the services tool:
- Right click on Start -> Run -> Type “services.msc” without quotes and press OK.
- Click Start -> Type “services” without quotes and press ENTER.
In the window that opens, you need to locate the so-called “print queue”. Depending on your version of Windows and the language you have it in, this service may be called “Print Spooler”.
Now simply right-click on said service and select Restart. You can also select Shut Down, wait a few seconds, then right-click again to select Start. This second is recommended if you had many documents in the print queue, to make sure they get deleted.
Once done, your printer should “resurrect” and you will be able to print again with no problem.
Can this task be automated?
As you will have seen, restarting the print service is very simple, but if you don’t want to have to go around to enter the services and remember the name of the one you need to restart, this is something that can be easily automated. To do this, we will create an executable file on the desktop, so that when you double click on it, the service will automatically restart, so let’s go.
Start by opening a notepad in Windows (Click Start -> Type “notepad” without quotes and press ENTER). In the notepad window that opens, copy and paste or type the following:
@Echo off
cd c:Windowssystem32
NET choke coil
NET boot spooler
exit
Then click on the menu File -> Save As… and in the window that opens, make sure that the desktop is selected at the top, and at the bottom, give it the name you want but make sure to add .bat at the end. For example, we’ll call it “reset printer.bat”.
After that, a new icon will be created on your desktop called Restart Printer. Well, the next time you want to restart the print service, just right click on it and select “Run as administrator”. When you do, you will automatically restart the print service.
