The easiest way to cancel a print job is to press the big, red Cancel (or X) button on your printer’s console. The second easiest way is to find the wee li’l printer dude in the Notification Area, open it, and delete the document from the printing queue. But sometimes the li’l printer dude disappears before you can open him.
The reason the printer dude disappears is that the document is no longer in your computer. It’s been spooled off to the printer. Seeing how today’s printers have oodles of memory, that happens a lot and quickly, especially with smaller documents.
So when the printer dude is gone, your next resort is to manually stop the printer: Waltz on over to it and turn it off. That always works.
The li’l printer dude is really a shortcut icon to your printer’s folder. That folder contains the documents you’re printing. In the folder, they’re called jobs, which harkens back to the ancient mainframe world of computers, when each task the computer performed was a job.
It’s possible to put a shortcut icon on the desktop for your printer’s folder. That way you always have access to the printer’s folder even when the li’l printer dude vanishes.
In Windows 7, follow these steps:
- From the Start menu, choose Devices and Printers.
- Right-click the icon for your main printer, the one with the green checkmark.
- Choose the command Create Shortcut.
In Windows Vista, obey these steps:
- From the Start menu choose Printers.
- Right-click the icon for your default printer, the one with the green checkmark.
- Choose the command Create Shortcut.
After completing these steps, you’ll see your printer’s icon appear on the desktop. Open the printer icon to see the queue.
Again, opening the printer icon won’t save you when your printer has already gobbled up the document. But at least you’ll find the desktop printer icon more handy to get to than hunting down the li’l printer dude on the Notification Area.
