As lead technician at my IT firm that specializes in service, I have to deal with a lot of printers.  It seems that one thing all Windows printing systems have a hard time with is the infamous “Stuck Print Queue”.  You go to print a document and that cute little printer pops up in the corner.  Then you get hit with the Red X Of DOOM!  and an indescript message about how your document failed to print.  Well fret no more, me laddy!  With this simple batch script, you can be up and printing again in a jiffy.  I have to deal with this problem at least twice a week, so I now just refer people to this to fix it.

@echo off
@echo ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
@echo + Print Queue Repair v0.1 by Seanp2k +
@echo + Copyright 2008 seanp2k.com +
@echo ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
@echo.
net stop spooler
ERASE /S /F /Q %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*
net start spooler
@echo Done! If there were any errors, google is your friend.
pause

This should work on any system from Windows 95 on up, although I’m not positive Windows 95 / Vista store their print queue on the disk at the same location as 2000 / XP generation OSs.

Paste that sucker in notepad and make sure the file extension is “whatever.bat” and not “whatever.txt.bat”…or, for your convenience, you can just download it here.