After you or other users on
the network have sent print jobs to a given printer, anyone with rights
to manage the queue can work with it. If nothing else, it’s often useful
to observe the queue to check its progress. This way, you can better
choose which printer to print to, or whether some intervention is
necessary, such as adding more paper.
Tip
You can drag a printer’s icon from the Printers window to your desktop for easy access. |
To view a printer’s
queue, click Start, Devices and Printers, then double-click the
printer’s icon. For a local printer this should display the queue
window. For network printer, this displays a summary window;
double-click See What’s Printing to view the queue.
Tip
When
print jobs are pending for a local printer, workstation, an icon
appears in the notification area, near the clock. You can hover the
mouse pointer over it to see the number of your documents waiting to
print. Right-click it and select the printer’s name to examine the
queue. |
Figure 1
shows a sample printer’s folder with a print queue and related
information. The window displays the status of the printer (in the title
bar) and the documents that are queued up, including their sizes,
status, owner, pages, date submitted, and so on.
For network printers, to
keep network traffic down to a dull roar, Windows updates the queue
display only every so often. If you are printing to a network printer
and want to check the current state of affairs, choose View, Refresh, or
press F5 to immediately update the queue information.
Tip
By
default, all users can pause, resume, restart, and cancel printing of
their own documents. However, to manage documents printed by other
users, the printer’s owner or the network administrator must give you
the Manage Documents permission. If
you find that Windows says you don’t have permission to perform some
function, such as deleting a document from the queue or changing printer
settings, in most cases you can right-click the document or printer and
select Run As Administrator to perform the operation with elevated
privileges. From the pop-up menu, select the task that you were trying
to perform, and try again. |
Deleting a File from the Queue
After sending a
document to the queue, you might reconsider printing it, or you might
want to reedit the file and print it again later. If so, you can remove
the file from the queue. To do so, right-click the document and choose
Cancel, or choose Document, Cancel from the menu. The document is then
removed from the printer’s queue window.
If you’re trying to delete
the job that’s currently printing, you might have some trouble. At the
very least, the system might take some time to respond.
And, as mentioned earlier,
if you are told that you don’t have permission to delete another user’s
document, click Printer in the queue windows’ menu, select Open As
Administrator, follow the User Account Control Prompt to enter an
Administrator’s password, then try again.
Canceling All Pending Print Jobs on a Given Printer
Assuming you have been given the privilege, you can cancel all
the print jobs on a printer. In the Devices and Printers window,
right-click the printer and choose Cancel All Documents. A confirmation
dialog box appears to confirm this action.
If you have a printer’s queue window open, you can also select Printer, Cancel All Documents from that window’s menu.
Pausing, Resuming, and Restarting the Printing Process
If you need to, you
can pause the printing process for a particular printer or even just a
single document print job. This capability can be useful in case you
have second thoughts about a print job, want to give other jobs a chance
to print first, or just want to adjust or quiet the printer for some
reason.
To pause a print job,
right-click it and choose Pause. Pretty simple. The word Paused then
appears on the document’s line. The printing might not stop immediately
because your printer might have a buffer that holds data in preparation
for printing. The printing stops when the buffer is empty. When you’re
ready to resume printing, right-click the job in question, and choose
Resume.
Tip
Pausing a document lets other documents later in the queue proceed to print, essentially moving them ahead in line. |
In
some situations, you might need to pause all the jobs on your printer
so that you can add paper to it, alter the printer settings, or just
quiet the printer for a bit while you take a phone call. To pause all
jobs, open the printer’s queue window and choose Printer, Pause
Printing. You have to choose the command again to resume printing, and
the check mark on the menu goes away.
Should
you need to (because of a paper jam or other botch), you can restart a
printing document from the beginning. Just right-click the document and
choose Restart.
