Printer that won’t delete in XP
Filed Under (Windows) by cranst on 28-04-2006
If you’ve ever configured more than one printer or swapped printers, you may run into the issue I had here. You try to delete the old printer, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Reboots won’t help and Safe Mode doesn’t show any printers. In most cases what has happened is the printer was changed out or went out while you had documents in the print queue. This basically ties the printer up until you clear those out. Notice the the number circled in Figure 1. This is the number of documents this printer is waiting on.
Figure 1
If you right-click on the printer as seen in Figure 2, and click ‘Cancel All Documents,’ your printer will either delete itself (from previous delete command) or will be ready to delete via right-click ‘Delete.’
Figure 2
That’s a useful tip on any printer. My personal favorite tip for printers is: be careful if you share a printer across networks. Granted most people use a firewall now-a-days, but for those who don’t and have a broadband connection with the computer wide open, anyone scanning for open windows file shares will find your shared printer. Most of the time people will leave your printer alone and plunder your accessable files, but then again then may decide to print interesting things on your printer. It could be just malicious (like printing massive color blocks to use all of your colored ink), to shocking (‘Honey I swear I didn’t print them, but I need to keep them to see if I can figure out where they came from!’), to down right cryptic (‘Mars Need Women’), Unless you need to specifically share a printer on a network, I would turn all print sharing off, and alway invest in a decent firewall (MS Windows XP’s firewall is NOT a decent firewall).