Why are Print Spoolers still such a PIA?

[el-Capitan]

When a job gets stuck, deleting it from the print queue never does it. You still need to restart the machine and printer or manually stop the spooler, manually delete the job in windows/system32/spooler, restart the service and, for good measure, also restart the printer.

Ahhh! Why does still have to be so complicated?

/rant

 

[PliotronX]

Is it an HP printer?

 

[el-Capitan]

Yeah. Its going out to trash later today. How did you know?

 

[PliotronX]

That's your problem right there. Semi-serious

 

[el-Capitan]

Ha. HP has been on my shit list for a while now - all because of this printer. Doesn't surprise me then that it is to blame. I should haven't blamed it on the OS (OSX displays the same symptoms, btw).

 

[PliotronX]

Dang, I was going to suggest different USB drivers if it is local or maybe PostScript over PCL, etc.. but yeah there is no escaping the HP-ness. The only reason I know is because one of my firm's larger clients is exclusively HP/Xerox printers and let me tell you how fun it is when HP's go AWOL on a print server...

 

[Emulex]

Why do you need a print spooler? Used to be hp printers didn't have hard drives and you didn't really multi-task - so other than permission to print, write directly to the printer without the spooler service!

you can ftp to hp printers and dump a PDF or PCL file on their storage and it will get around to it!

 

[FeuerFrei]

I was surprised the other day when shutting down my pc caused my single-page print job to abort mid-page. Apparently the spooler just dribbles out the data.
FYI: Windows Vista and HP Photosmart all-in-one, circa 2006.

 

[Puffnstuff]

The spool is useful if your printer doesn't have enough memory to accept the entire document when you tell it to print.

 

[JoeBleed]

It's not just HP printers. Oddly, this used to work really well in windows 9x and maybe nt4. I not sure why it's gotten like this.

Jobs usually will eventually delete. I've found it's bets to leave the printer on while doing this and give it about 5 minutes. You may or may not have to power cycle the printer afterwards. Anything over 5 minutes and i kill the spooler service. wait 30 seconds and restart the spooler service. or just reboot the pc if you want. then power cycle the printer.

As for why someone's job stopped mid page when you were rebooting. a lot, if not all, little printers these day do "host" processing where your computer is processing the job and not the printer. This may or may not have anything to do with why deleting jobs take so long now. But i see the same thing on thermal printers and they're not host based from what i know. I could be wrong though.

a crude rule of thumb i had at one point for laser printers, if it didn't have a NIC, it was hosed based and i wouldn't buy it. I'm not really sure if that applies anymore with all of the cheap home printers being wifi now.