How to flush & clear a jammed Print job queue in Windows 7 or Vista

How many times has it happened with you that you want to cancel a print job, but when you right click on the print job to end the job, it just does nothing and you are also unable to print anything. In short your print queue gets jammed – neither can you print anything nor cancel the pending print jobs.

Clear Print job queue

You have 4 options !

1) Reboot. 

This solves the problem and most usually do this.

2) Manually flush the print queue.

Type services.msc in Windows start menu search bar and hit enter to open Services. Navigate down to Print Spooler. Rt click on this services and ‘Stop’ this service.

Next navigate to C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS folder and delete all the CONTENTS of this folder.

Now rt click again on the Print Spooler service and restart it.

Refresh the print queue. Your problem should have been solved. 

3) Copy-paste the following in Notepad and save it as a .bat file:

@echo off
echo Stopping print spooler.
echo.
net stop spooler
echo Erasing Temporary Junk Printer Documents
echo.
del /Q /F /S “%systemroot%\System32\Spool\Printers\*.*
echo Starting print spooler.
echo.
net start spooler

Run the bat file when the need arises. Alternatively, you may also download this ready-made bat file : fixprintq.

4) Use a nifty portable freeware called Print Flush 1.3. This utility is basically a simple batch file that takes all the steps necessary to un-jam a printer queue and puts them at a click of the mouse.