Friday, January 24, 2014

Windows 7 Device and Printers not loading. Issues with Printer Spooler service.

I started this week experiencing issues with my computer. Some programs starts not working when doing an operating and click on it would read “Not Responding”.  It happened that I needed to print something and I when to Devices and Printers on the control panel and notice that it was not loading. I knew about the Printer Spooler service. So I went ahead and went into services.msc and look for Printer Spooler. It was running and set up as Automatic which is great that’s what we want. 
I right click and restart and immediately the Devices and Printers on the Control panel load up. However, I was not able to print. I tried to read the device and nothing would come up. 

I continue to had this issue for several days. When an application like snag-it or Word or Excel would hang up, I restarted the Printer Spooler and it worked right away. So I thought this freaking Printer Spooler is corrupt. I tried finding help online but no help at all. I end up finding about Restarted the Bluetooth Service. This was not helpful for me at. However, it looks like for several users it did helped. So give that a shot first if your Devices and Printers is now loading in Windows 7 or possible in Windows 8. 
What you want to do is make sure you start up the services:

 1) Bluetooth Service 
 2) Bluetooth Support Service. 

If after your start or restart this services you still have the issue like me, try the following: 

 1. Go to the Start menu and type REGEDIT. Then right-click on REGEDIT and select 'Run as Administrator'. 

 2. Go down to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environment\Windows NT x86\Print Processors Under Print Processors there should be a folder called 'winprint'. If it's there delete and recreate it. if it's not there create it. 

 3. To create the 'winprint' folder and key, right-click on 'Print Processors' and select 'New' - 'Key'. Type in winprint Now, select the new winprint folder and right-click in the black white space to the right where the sub keys should be and select 'New' - 'String Value'. 
Type in Driver for the name. Double click driver and enter in winprint for the value. 

 4. Now try installing the printer. 

I found this from the Microsoft website http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/windows-7-add-printer-does-not-work/f7d4e46e-7f5a-48fa-b8db-d709d57494ac

After doing this I was able to add a new printer and all my printer spooler issuer where gone.