Why cant I print in Windows Xp? No Printers are Showing Up!! ~ Ask The Admin

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Why cant I print in Windows Xp? No Printers are Showing Up!!


All of the sudden, XP will not communicate with the printer. Or any printer for that matter! I can see that there are a bunch of print jobs in the queue. When I try to cancel the print jobs, nothing happens. I'm stuck and need to print. HELP!

OK lets not freak out and pull an office space...It looks like your print spooler crashed out (Edit: no this is nothing like pc load letter). This can happen for a variety of reasons. Corrupted print job and software crash are among some of the possible reasons. Most of the time this can be resolved by restarting the print spooler service. This will clear out your Queue and reconnect you to the printer. I always physically restart the printer if possible and then follow these steps:

Start and stop the print spooler by following these steps:

  • Open Computer Management.
  • In the details pane, double-click Print Spooler.
  • Do one of the following depending on the task you want to do:
  • Click Stop to stop the service.
  • Click Start to start the service.
This should have you back up and printing in no time. For the more advanced Admin, you can do this from the command line with the following commands.

net stop spooler
net start spooler

Yup the net command has either a start or stop option and it will do just that to any service you know the name of - wildcards work as well!


What do you guys do to solve printer issues - local or networked?

_TheSpoolinAdmiN_