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Print Spooler Issues
Posted in: Printers, blog by CW on 7 September 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D., in a recent post to Chaos Manor Reviews, writes about a problem many of us have experienced, an issue with his print spooler. Yes, even Ph.D.s run into problems with their printers.
Just what is the print spooler?
In computer science, spooling refers to a process of transferring data by placing it in a temporary working area where another program may access it for processing at a later point in time. The normal English verb “spool” can refer to the action of a storage device that incorporates a physical spool or reel, such as a tape drive.
Spooling refers to copying files in parallel with other work. The most common use is in reading files used by a job into or writing them from a buffer on a magnetic tape or a disk. Spooling is useful because devices access data at different rates. The buffer provides a waiting station where data can rest while the slower device catches up.
This temporary working area would normally be a file or storage device. Usual uses of the term spooling apply to situations where there is little or no direct communication between the program writing the data and the program reading it. Spooling is often used when a device writes data faster than a target device can read it, allowing the slower device to work at its own pace without requiring processing to wait for it to catch up. Data is only modified through addition or deletion at the ends of the area, i.e., there is norandom access or editing.
The most common spooling application is print spooling: documents formatted for printing are stored onto a buffer (usually an area on a disk) by a fast processor and retrieved and printed by a relatively slower printer at its own rate. As soon as the fast processor has written the document to the spool device it has finished with the job and is fully available for other processes. One or more processes may rapidly write several documents to a print queue without waiting for each one to print before writing the next. Spooler or print management software may allow priorities to be assigned to jobs, notify users when they have printed, distribute jobs among several printers, allow stationery to be changed or select it automatically, generate banner pages to identify and separate print jobs, etc. (Source)
Here’s the problem Jerry encountered and how he went about fixing it. You may want to bookmark this entry for future reference, because at some point you will run into spooler issues.
It started simply enough when Roberta said her printer wasn’t working. I thought that ought to be simple enough to fix. It was probably a corrupted driver. Or maybe the printer wasn’t installed properly. I’ve been fixing Windows annoyances like this for years, and surely it will be easy enough with Windows 7.
Six hours later I knew better. The problem was that I knew too much, and my first attempts to fix things made it all worse.
My first attempt was to open notepad, create a “foo.txt” document (in my system any file named either foo or .foo can be deleted when found if you’re not actually using it at the moment) and try to print that. All went well. The system said it was printing. The only problem was, nothing happened. It wasn’t printing.
Next step is to check the cables. The printer is an older USB HP LaserJet that is attached to Roberta’s Windows 7 machine. It has never given us any problems. I disconnected the USB cable. The computer gave the acknowledging beep, then another beep when I connected the cable again. Not a cable problem. Power cycling the printer gave the same result. This is an HP LaserJet 1100 and doesn’t have much in the way of testing abilities – at least I wasn’t able to find any way to get it to self-test – so I wasn’t entirely sure that the problem wasn’t the printer itself, but nothing seemed to be wrong with it.
Next look at the Printers in Windows 7. This isn’t as simple as it was in previous versions of Windows. Actually it is in fact far simpler, but only if you didn’t know how to do it the old way and are just trying to find it in Windows 7 for the first time. The trick is to find the printer. That turns out to be done with Start > Control Panel > Devices and Printers > then right click on the printer. The HP 1100 was there. I could see its print queue: there were two documents in it, the older .pdf document Roberta had been trying to print when she discovered her printer wasn’t working, and foo.txt. Aha, thought I, and deleted the two documents. Only they didn’t actually delete.
At this point I could have solved my problem in about thirty seconds had I known what to do. The proper solution to the problem would have been to go Start>Computers>C:\>Windows>System32>Spool>Printers, find the .pdf document in the spool queue, and either move it elsewhere or delete it. Delete foo.txt while I was at it. Restart the computer, and all would be well. That is eventually what I did, and it worked; but by that time I had mucked up the system into a near FUBAR state, and six hours had passed.
Instead of doing that, I tried the print troubleshooter wizard that was offered. That led me to reinstall the HP 1100 print drivers (easy enough and free, but it takes time) and try to reinstall the printer. That led to a persistent error saying “I can’t add a printer because the Spooler Service is not working.” That led to a lengthy Internet search, some command line stunts to start and restart the Print Service (I won’t go into the details because it’s not really likely you’ll have to do this), and a bunch of other futile and time wasting efforts. By the time I was finished I had three instances of the HP 1100 printer installed. Whichever one I selected as default inherited the Spooler queue with the unprintable .pdf document, and no measure I could take would remove that document from the print queue.
In other words, the problem is in Windows 7: the user access to the print queue doesn’t work (or doesn’t always work) if you do it the Windows way. Eventually when all else failed I kept searching the Internet to find where Windows 7 actually spools documents, and came up with the location in System32; but had I not done that, I would never have solved the problem. Example: at one point I deleted every print installation on the machine. I reset the system. Then I reinstalled the HP 1100. Of course as soon as I did and let it be the default printer, it inherited the unprintable file and stopped working, and, of course, I could not delete the unprintable file from the Control Panel access to the printers. Nothing I know of can delete a bad file except going to System32>Spoolers and doing it by hand. That works.
If you prefer the “official” word on solving spooler issues, here’s Microasoft’s advice.
Symptoms:
You cannot print from any program, and you may receive any of the following error messages when you try to print a document:
System error 1068 has occurred.
The dependency service or group failed to start.Spooler SubSystem App has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Operation could not be completed. The print spooler service is not running.
Resolutions:
To fix this problem, reset the print spooler.
That’s why so many of us do not depend on Microsoft to give us the best solutions to problems with their products. You’ll probably get better, more detailed answers to your Windows questions by Googling the exact problem you’re having to see what others have posted about it or visiting a good help forum like Scot Finnie’s Newsletter Forum. (Full disclosure: I’m an administrator on that forum, which is the reason I know you’ll get prompt and useful information there.)
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