From time to time you may have the need to delete your printers and their drivers however doing this from the printers control panel application may not be possible for some reason or another. Manually removing the printers and their drivers is most often used when the print spooler will not start due to a corrupt printer or driver. The other possibility is that the printer just won’t delete. To manually remove the printers and the printer drivers please follow the steps below.
- Go to Start>Run and type in “services.msc” and press enter
- Locate printer spooler in the list, right click it and press stop
- Go to Start>Run type in ‘regedit’ and press enter
- Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print
- Right click the Print folder and go to export and save the file to your hard drive. This is a backup of the keys we are about to delete in case there are any problems.
- Expand the Printers sub folder and you should see a list of the printers on your computer. Delete these one by one by right clicking the folder and going to delete.
- Expand the Environments folder and under each Windows folder change to Drivers>Version 3 and you should see a list of the drivers. Delete each one of these in the same manner as before.
- Close the registry editor and go to Start>Run and type in ‘explorer.exe’ and press enter.
- Browse to ‘C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\’ and under each folder in this directory browse into it and if it has a directory with a number rename this to have ‘.old’ at the end.
- Restart your computer and try to install the printer and drivers again.
- If there are any problems you can simply double click the registry file you exported and rename the above folders back to their original name.
