Printer Status: Spooling – What Exactly Does It Mean?

There are many technical terms in printing which could be foreign to many. In fact, with regards to the activity of printing, one of the most common questions is the technical term spooling. Spooling is a status which often times appear on the printer’s indicator right after you send a document to your printer.

Before we go into details, you would need to know that printers come with less memory. In fact, some printers only have a few megabytes of memory. This means, through spooling, you would be able to send large document files or series of documents to a printer without having to wait until a current printing task is done.

Functionality

So, what is spooling and how does it happen? If your computer and printer is on a shared network, your printer could handle all the printing jobs in queue only if your printer is on a spooler program. Through spooling, it would line up all the printing tasks in order that the printer has received the task. Though this could be a little bit frustrating, but in reality, it could actually improve the speed and efficiency in terms of printing activities.

Benefits

When you are in a huge workplace, there could be huge number of computers which could be communicating to the same printer and when this happens, spooling usually appears to be common. Through spooling, printing jobs are managed and done according to the manner and order the printer has received the printing tasks. Through this, the printer would not be confused nor be over flooded with requests.

If spooling is not present, each and every computer would have to manually wait for the printer to become available before you would be able to press the print button. Furthermore, through spooling, you would find the queue of documents received which makes it easier to delete documents before your document is printed. For example, if you accidentally print the wrong page or you would need to change the format of your file, you could just delete the printing task in the queue. To do this, all you need to do is to open all active printers and search for the name of your file. You could pause, schedule, restart or cancel your printing job. Through this feature, you would definitely be able to save time, ink and paper.

Considerations

Though most operating systems have print spooling as part of their features, it could also be installed manually or turn it off completely.

To turn off the spooler on windows

• Open your task manager
• Click on the services tab
• Scroll down the list of services, search for Spooler
• Right click on it
• You would find options such as start, stop, restart, open services, search online and go to details
• Select the task that you would like to do manually. In this case, to turn it off

Other Options

There are two ways to do spooling. You could print immediately after the last page has been spooled. This way is faster and most often than not the most preferred option.

The second option is that you could set up a queue of low priority documents and high priority. You could also keep the printed documents in the spooler once they are printed and access them again. This is convenient especially if you would like to print the same files again. The computer will resubmit them after and quickly do some additional prints.

Conclusion

We hope that through this article, you were able to find useful information about spooling printer status.