How to cancel a print job in Windows 7?

Did this ever happen to you? You need to print something BADLY, but suddenly your printer goes crazy and you can’t even cancel your print job? After realizing that you overdone it and your printer can’t cope with that many requests, it’s usually already too late. Then it’s handy to know how to cancel a print job in Windows 7.

Ok, normally you would simply open the printer queue and right-click on one of the print jobs to cancel it via the context-menu. But apparently, sometimes the printer won’t even respond when it’s getting a lot of print jobs at the same time and will hang or freeze completely. What then?

Rule #1: Don’t panic!

You can force your printer to cancel a print job

1. Open a command prompt
2. Enter NET STOP SPOOLER

3. Enter NET START SPOOLER

4. Open the printer control panel. Right-click on your printer and click on “See what’s printing”, then select your printer.

5. At the top click on View and select Refresh:

All of print jobs should now be canceled and your printer should be ready for work again. The spooler service that we stopped and started via the command prompt stores print jobs in your memory so that the printer can access it later. However, if you start too many print jobs it can happen that your printer freezes. So, now you know how to cancel print jobs in Windows 7! THis should also work on Windows Vista and XP, if it doesn’t leave a response and let us know your system.