There are numerous foreign phrases in the field of printing that you might not be familiar with. Spooling is one of the most often asked questions we receive in relation to printing. A status indicator will frequently display this not long after you send a document to the printer.
It’s crucial to understand from the outset that printers have much less memory than you might think. Even in this day and age, some only have a few megabytes of RAM available. The printer you are using may also be five or ten years older than your computer because not everyone has a brand-new, state-of-the-art printer.
By using printer spooling, you can send one or more large document files to a printer without having to wait for the current task to be completed. Consider it as a cache or buffer. It’s a location where your documents can “line up” and prepare for printing after another printing task has been finished.
Functionality
How is printing spooling accomplished? The spooling will be handled by whichever computer you used to print from. However, the network server might manage it if you’re using a printer that is shared throughout your network. All print tasks in the queue are managed by a programme known as a “spooler”. It will send the line of documents to the printer in the sequence they were received (when available). Even though you could frequently notice this term when your printer isn’t doing anything at all, this capability is actually intended to increase speed and efficiency, which at first may appear a little frustrating.
Benefits
Spooling can seem quite common in an office setting where hundreds of computers may be interacting with the same printer. This is less frequent to see when your computer is working alone and in isolation from the printer. Consider it a system for automatically managing print jobs in the order that they were received. It makes sure that there aren’t too many requests that overwhelm and confuse the network or printer.
Before you could even click “print,” each computer would have to manually wait for the printer to become available if spooling wasn’t used. Most people take it for granted because it’s handled automatically in the background.
The ability to access each task separately could ultimately save you time, ink, paper, headaches, and headaches. If one printer is broken or not available, you can also reassign tasks in the spool to different printers.
Considerations
While print spooling is typically bundled with operating systems, if you don’t have one, you can manually install it. The majority of us use Windows, which comes pre-installed with one setup. Most likely, you’ll never even need it or need to think about it. However, in some circumstances you might wish to fully turn it off.
Open the Task Manager and select the “services” tab to disable the spooler on Windows. The word “Spooler” will appear around 3/4 of the way down the alphabetical list of services when you move your cursor down from here. A window that reads “Start, Stop, Restart, Open Services, Search Online, Go to Details” will appear when you right-click it. You can manually do whatever action you want from here. But keep in mind that it is usually always preferable to have spooling turned on rather than off. It may significantly slow it down, making it difficult for you to print more quickly.
Other Options
Typically, there are two approaches to spooling. Your printer can be set to print immediately or after the final page has been spooled. Obviously, the quickest and best choice is to print right away. However, you can configure it to begin printing once the final page has been spooled. No matter what sequence you initially submitted the documents to the printer in, you can do this to create up a queue of low-priority documents and subsequently assign some documents as a high priority.
Additionally, some people may choose to preserve the printed documents in the spooler so that you can access them again after printing. If you anticipate needing to print the same files once more for a second time, this could be useful. It will make it possible for you to submit them again later, allowing you to print more copies right away when you need them. It’s crucial that you understand that maintaining spooled documents will eventually take up disc space. Consider how much time they require and be careful not to accumulate too many documents at once.
Conclusion
Although the majority of users won’t need to change their computer’s spooling settings, it’s nevertheless vital to understand this terminology in case you ever see a notification or status message that says “spooling.” In the majority of cases, it is actually maintained and configured automatically. However, having a better understanding can liberate you to easily manage certain documents that are awaiting printing.
Each of us engages in multitasking. In this instance, printing requests are easily handled by our computers, so you never need to give it much thought.