If we talk about printing then you will find many foreign terms with which you are already familiar. Well, one of the most common questions that many asks related to printing is known as spooling. Many times, you will see that the status indicator will read the spooling terms soon after you send a document to the printer. So, do you know What does Printer Status Spooling means?
Before we start on this topic it is important that you know that printers have a lot less memory than you may think they do. Some of these come with a few megabytes of memory even during this day when technology has become so advanced. Moreover, there are many people who do not have the latest brand-new upgraded version of the printer. Some of these printers might as well be older than the computer.
So, to answer your question What does Printer Status Spooling means? Printing spooling is nothing but it just allows you to send large document files or a series of them to the printer without you having to wait till the current task is over. You can think of it as the buffer or the cache.
Well, there are many functions and other benefits of the spooling term on the printer status that you often get to see. So, tighten your seat belts and get ready to know about them.
What Is A Print Spooler?
Before we discuss What Does Printer Status Spooling Means, first, let’s discuss about print spooler. Well, the print spooler is the dedicated program of the software that helps to manage the order of the documents, so that they proceed to the print queue. When you choose the print option your program will talk to the print spooler service to work out how it will draw the print job in such a way that the printer will easily understand it and will put the colors in the correct spots on the page.
Let’s understand this with the help of an example. Think of the print spooler to the third base in baseball. The service of the print spooler will let the documents know when they are next. They will hold the documents if there is another job ahead of it that is at the present printing. You will not be able to have two players on the base and the printers will not be able to print many documents all at once.
So, what does this means? It means that the print spooler allows you to send the document to the printer while the other one is printing. But it will hold it in the queue till the current task has been fully printed. So, you actually don’t have to wait or the previous job to finish off the printing before you choose the printing option. It is perhaps the way the computer will let the printer know that it has another job in the queue.
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What Does Printer Status Spooling Means?
Let’s answer your question on What Does Printer Status Spooling Means? Well, the printer spooling actually means that the other document is getting printed and your document is waiting in the queue. The main reason behind this is that printers do not have much memory like computers. They require an intermediary program that will conduct and wave the print jobs in the home plate. The computer speed will store in the queue and the speed of the printer will take over when the document has left the queue and is now printing.
How Does Printer Spooling Take Place?
Now, you know What Does Printer Status Spooling Means, let’s about printer spooling. You may ask how exactly does the spooling happen? Well, whatever computer you printed the documents from will be able to handle all the spooling. But if you are using the printer that is shared over your network then the network server will be able to handle it. The spooler program helps to manage all kinds of print jobs that are in the queue. It will send the line of documents in the order that it has received to the printer. This may seem to be a bit frustrating but the functions have been designed in such a manner that it will help to improve the speed as well as the efficiency.
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What Are The Benefits?
You will see that in the office environment where many computers are communicating with the same printer the spooling will appear quite often. When your computer is on its own and will individually communicate with the printer it is not very common to see it. You can think of it as the automated way by which you can manage the print jobs in the proper way and in the order that they were received. It will make sure that the network or the printer does not become flooded and confused with the requests.
If spooling was not used then each of the computers had to manually wait for the printer to become available before it can even hit the print option. This is perhaps something that many people take for granted since it is managed in the background on its own.
As there is a queue of documents in the order in which they have been received the spooling will make it easy to delete the documents before they are printed, so if you accidentally print the wrong page or if you want to format it differently than you can choose to delete the specific task that is present in the queue. Though you can do this in many different ways accessing the queue is actually very easy. In Windows, you can just open all the active printers in your setting and you will get to see which documents are next in the line. From here you will be able to pause, restart the schedule, and cancel the pending print jobs. Isn’t that super easy?
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Considerations
Though most of the operating systems are included in the print spooling which you can even install manually if they are not available. Most of us do use Windows which has one set up by default, you don’t even have to access it or even give it a thought. But there might be situations when you actually want to turn it off completely.
If you want to turn off the spooler on your Windows then here’s what you can do:
- Just open the task manager and then tap on the services tab.
- Now, scroll down the alphabetical order of the services and you will see spooler will show up about ¾ of the way down.
- Right-click on it to see the window that will show, start, go to details, stop, search online, open services and restart.
- You can now manually go whatever you feel like. Remember that it is always better that you keep spooling turned on.
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Wrapping Up
So now after reading this post you do know What does Printer Status Spooling means? It comes with benefits that we have discussed above. If you have any questions, you can reach us in the comment section below.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What Are Print Spooler Alternatives?
You will see that the print spoolers come with a Windows system but don’t worry there are a few alternatives that you can check out. One of the commonly used outside Windows is the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS). It allows the computers to act as the print server and do the print spooling and scheduling. CUPS uses the Internet Printing Protocol (IIP) so that it can manage the print jobs and queues. CUOPS are commonly used for printer spooling on the Linux system and macOS.
Q What Are The Other Ways To Go About Spooling?
Well, there are two ways to go about spooling. You can make the printer print immediately or after the last page is spooled. Print immediately will be fast and is the most preferred option. But you can even set it so that it will start printing after the last page is spooled. In this way, you will setup the queue of the low priority documents and then set some documents as the high priority no matter in which order you sent them.
