Printer Queue blocked

Lee H

Hi

Can someone tell me why random printers sometimes have a blocked queue

This stops anyone from printing until the printjob in question has been removed, usually by restarting the Print Spooler service on the server

It doesnt happen a lot but today i have had to do it to 2 printers

Just wondering if this is normal or is there soemthing i can do to stop it in future

Any help would be great


Lee H

sprkymrk

Make sure you have plenty of room on the drive with the spooler - the global default location for all printer spool files is %SystemRoot%\System32\Spool\Printers. I have seen large print jobs fill up the drive, but usually the end result is a crashed server. Just a thought that came to my mind. Otherwise the most common reason would be flaky printer drivers.

Lee H

Thanks spiky

We have a 8GIG partition on the server called surprisingly "Print Spooler"

Located the setting in REGEDIT and it was set as default C drive, i then changed it so hopefully
that might fix it

Although free space on C was 2.45GIG, that surley is plenty of space for a print spooler


Lee

sprkymrk

Lee H wrote:

Although free space on C was 2.45GIG, that surley is plenty of space for a print spooler

I think a small site I managed for a while had about the same space on a W2K server. There was a girl who worked there as a marketing/graphics designer and she used to spool up 2-3 huge graphics files to the color printer (or was it a plotter?) at the same time, each of which was in the 500-1000MB size. Once we figured out it was her print jobs killing the server we did what you did and moved the spooler to a seperate partition with about 8GB. Don't forget the swap file is also on the system drive by default and can grow dynamically as well, compounding the problem.

Good luck with it, hopefully you fixed it.

sprkymrk

Lee H wrote:

Located the setting in REGEDIT and it was set as default C drive, i then changed it so hopefully that might fix it

The best way to change the default location is to go to your Printers>Server Properties, and then click the Advanced tab. In the Spool Folder box, type the path that you want to use.

I believe the registry is where you change it for specific printers.