Quick tip (Windows only). I’m sure most of us sometimes are unable to cancel a printing job and the print job is stuck on your printer print job list. This is sure a frustrating problem especially if you need to print something urgently. The method below will delete the entire print job queue and cancel all print jobs by stopping the print spooler service and delete its print job files. It should work on most versions of Windows.

1. Run Notepad (Start Menu > Run, type notepad and press ‘Enter’).

2. Copy the command below to Notepad (click the view source icon):

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
net start spooler
pause

3. Save it as a .bat file. Make sure you select ‘All files (*.*)’ (1). Give it a meaningful name, for example, ‘cancelprint.bat’ (2) (without the quotes ‘’) and save it to a location where you can easily find the file, maybe on your desktop. The .bat extension is important! For example, if you want to name it as ‘stopprint’, make sure you put ‘stopprint.bat’. Press ‘Save’ (3) to save it.

4. Next time you want to cancel a stuck print job, just run ‘cancelprint.bat’.

[Microsoft Support: How to cancel printing or to delete a print job that is stuck in the print queue in Windows XP]