Computer Printer Repair

This post provide printer support tips and trick for troubleshoot printer problems.If you can not add a printer and receive printer spooler problem to fix it make a tour Fix print spooler tips.

Any print job spooled to a printer is written as a temporary file to the %systemroot%\System32\Spool\Printers folder. The file is deleted after the printer indicates that the job has been printed. The primary print spool problem encountered is a lack of available disk space. If you print high-resolution graphics, you might have print jobs as large as 20 MB to 80 MB per file for a 32-bit image at standard page size. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t take many print jobs to overwhelm the typical Windows NT Workstation configuration.

When you print to the spooler, you create two files for each print job. The .SPL file is the actual print job spool file. You also create a shadow file, given the .SHD extension. The shadow file contains additional information about the print job that is not part of the print job itself, such as owner, priority, and so forth. If your computer crashes, .SPL and .SHD files remain in the default spool file until the service restarts and they are processed and printed. After being printed, these files are deleted from disk.

Should your spooled files become corrupted, they will be orphaned and remain in the spool folder taking up valuable space.

You can print directly to a printer from your application by turning off the print spooling feature. Before you print, open the Scheduling tab of the Printer Properties dialog box and select the Print directly to the printer radio button. When the printer next becomes available, your document prints. Until that point, you cannot use the application that originates the print job. You can task switch to another application and continue working until your printing application becomes available.