CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)  9  Chapter 4: Diagnosing and Troubleshooting in the Windows OS

Safe Windows Start-up 1 Troubleshooting Utilities

Many things can go wrong with printing. I think you should check the printer before you blame Windows. Cables, paper jam, not enough ribbon or toner. Wrong paper cannot be loaded properly and will cause paper jams. Laser printer needs to have the whole page in its RAM memory before it starts to print it. If it refuses to print a page, it might not fit in printer memory. In that case, you should delete some pictures take more memory. Ink jet does not need the whole page at once in memory.

Drivers, drivers… Unfortunately, it happens that some famous companies produce buggy drivers. You can experience a problem where printer starts to print (an endless) stream of characters which don't make any sense. You should immediately turn off the printer, stop the print job; turn the printer on after some time, when the job gets stopped.

The Event Viewer and its three logs, System, Application and Security

This is a good point to tell more about Print Spooler. Printer Spooler is printer's queue, a warehouse where applications store print jobs. It is an intermediary between the application and printer. The initial idea of Print Spooler is that an application does not need to wait for the printer. It will give the job to the Spooler, which has to wait, and you can use the application for something else in the meantime. Great, but when you suddenly change your mind and want to stop printing: you cannot do that from the application. Print Spooler is the one. This is where to find the cancel or pause button.

You double click a little printer icon in the tray to get this window (which may have a question mark indicating some problem!), or you could double-click the printer icon from Printers and Faxes. Then you right click a particular job.

But that cancel will not stop printing so quickly! Print Spool already sent data to printer's RAM that is why you need to reset the printer.

Print Spool is a service on NT family, in case you ever want to restart it you do not have to restart the computer, just use Services MMC (Microsoft Management Console).

Safe Windows Start-up 1 Troubleshooting Utilities