What Is Print Spooler and How to Reset It on Windows 10?

What Is Print Spooler

What is Print Spooler? It is a small application that manages paper print jobs sent from the computer to the printer or print server. It can store multiple print jobs in the print queue or buffer retrieved by the printer or print server.

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Why You Need Print Spooler

Sometimes, the printer cannot immediately process all the information about what you are printing because it is not fast enough and has low storage space.

Therefore, the printer needs a program to decide in which order the documents should be printed (depending on who clicked print first), and then slowly pass the list of documents to be printed instead of sending all the documents at once.

If you use the Windows operating system, a background processing program will be built into the device. It is used with your printer to order print jobs. Spooler means you don’t have to wait for one job to finish before you can load another job. That is Print Spooler.

How to Reset Print Spooler

When you use Print Spooler, you may also encounter many issues, such as Print Spooler keeps stopping, Print Spooler service not running, and so on. Most of the issues can be fixed by resetting or restarting the Print Spooler. The following are the methods for you to restart Print Spooler.

Way 1: Use Task Manager

The easiest way to reset or restart the print spooler is using Task Manager. The steps are listed below:

Step 1: Right-click the Start button and choose Task Manager.

Step 2: Go to the Services tab.

Step 3: Scroll down to locate the Spooler service, right-click it, and choose Restart.

Way 2: Use Command Prompt

Alternatively, you can also reset or restart Print Spooler Windows 10 in Command Prompt.

Step 1: Press Windows + R to open the Run window. Then, input cmd and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to run Command Prompt as an administrator.

Step 2: When you receive a User Account Control (UAC) window, click OK to confirm the operation.

Step 3: In the command console, input net stop spooler and press the Enter key to stop Print Spooler.

Step 4: To resolve print or print spooler problems, you can navigate to the directory C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers and delete all the contents in the Printers folder to remove the print jobs.

Step 5: Now, you can go back to Command Prompt, type net start spooler, and press Enter to start print spooler.

After that, you can start your print tasks again and they should be completed properly.

Way 3: Use Services

You can also perform the same operation in the Services app. Besides, you can make more changes in the service here.

You just need to invoke the Run window, input services.msc in the empty box, and click OK to open the Services app. Then, scroll down to locate the Print Spooler service.

To stop/restart print spooler, you can click Stop the service/Restart the service in the left pane, or right-click the service and choose Stop/Restart. If the service is stopped, you can click Start the service in the left pane, or choose Start from the context menu.

To make more configuration for the service, you can double-click it to open its Properties. Here, you can also stop/start Print Spooler by clicking the Stop/Start button. And you are allowed to choose a Start type from the drop-down list as your needs.

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Final Words

To sum up, this post has introduced what the Print Spooler is and how to reset it on Windows 10. I hope that this post can be helpful to you.