When you print from any program (including PCDART and the SPEAR Windows Print Utility) in Microsoft Windows the documents are stored in a print queue (a process sometimes called spooling or buffering print jobs) before actually being printed. If you have problems with your printer and repeatedly try printing from a program but nothing prints, those documents are still put into the Windows print queue. This means that, when you do get your printer to work, Windows will print all of the documents from all of the previous unsuccessful attempts to print. If this happens, turning off the printer or restarting the computer will not clear the documents from the queue. Windows will still try to print all pending documents the next time it detects your printer is ready. The only way to stop this is to remove the documents from the Windows print queue. Here's how to do that:
Click Start then Control Panel.
Select Printers and Other Hardware. Note: If the Windows XP Control Panel is set to use the Classic View then this step is not needed.
Select Printers and Faxes
Your default Windows printer will have a check mark in a circle above the printer icon (it may not be exactly the same as the picture above).
If you place the pointer over the icon (but do not click) a status message will pop up as shown above. In the example above there are zero documents pending. If you do have documents waiting to print the number of documents will show in this status box.
Right-click on the icon for the printer and select Cancel All Documents.
WARNING: To not select Delete from this menu. That will delete the PRINTER, not the documents.
Choose Yes to cancel the documents.
If you find you are having to cancel documents occasionally, you can create a shortcut to the printer on the Windows desktop so you don't have to go through the Control Panel every time (if you are having a lot of trouble with the printer and having to cancel documents frequently you should request a new printer).
From the Printers and Faxes window, right-click on the icon for the printer and select Create Shortcut.
Choose Yes to place the shortcut on the desktop.
Now you should have an icon for the printer on the desktop.
You only need to do the above steps to create the shortcut one time. After that you can use the shortcut icon to access the printer's settings.
Double-click the icon (shortcut) for your printer and a window will pop up showing any documents that are queued for printing. To cancel documents from this window, select Printer from the menu and then select Cancel All Documents.