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Yesterday I had a customer come to me with his laptop stating it was very slow, which indeed it was. His HP printer queue was hung and the spoolsv.exe process, which is the Printer Spooler, was consuming 100% of the CPU. Usually this is solved by doing the following:

1. Right click on My Computer and select Manage
2. Expand the Services and Applications section, then select Services
3. Locate Print Spooler, select it and click the Restart Service button on the toolbar

In most cases this should resolve the issue. However, for him, it did not as the queue still had a print job waiting to be printed and after the service started back up the process was immediately back to 100% CPU usage. When this happens, follow the instructions below:

1. Right click on My Computer and select Manage
2. Expand the Services and Applications section, then select Services
3. Locate Print Spooler, select it and click the Stop Service button on the toolbar
4. Leaving the Computer Management window open, double click on My Computer
5. Then double click on your C Drive, Windows directory, system32 directory, spool directory and finally PRINTERS directory (i.e. C:\Windows\system32\spool\PRINTERS).
6. Delete the files located in that directory then go back to the Computer Management window and, with Print Spooler service still selected, click the Start Service button.

That should resolve the issue, and it did for him until I tried printing a test page. The print queue was hung once again so I went through the above once more then looked at the printer properties. Noticed it was setup to use LPT1 but the printer was actually connected via USB. So I changed that and everyone was fine and dandy!

Got a call from a potential client whose laptop was really slow. I went over to his workplace and immediately identified that the Print Spooler was the culprit consuming 100% of the processor. I was able to clear out the print queue but once I tried to print something it’d go back to 100%.

My next step was going to be reinstall the drivers for the printer, incase they had become corrupt. However, while I was looking at the properties for the printer I had noticed it was setup to use LPT1, after a quick look at the cable I knew I found the problem. It was a USB printer, so I changed the port from LPT1 to USB and he was good to go.

For more information on ways to clear out a hung print queue on Windows check out this blog entry.