Why are spoolers dodgy?

[Wryel]

Just thinking, a lot of sites I work on have problems printing and a lot of the time its down to the spooler: once the service is restarted its fine. Anyone know what usually causes this?

 

[Magsy]

Bad printer drivers for one, get them all up to date. Sometimes you can isolate a specific driver as causing issues and replace with a similar one ie. HP LaserJet4 instead of LaserJet 5000

They always need restarting every now and then though, running win2k3 it is down to once a month tops Back on 2k it was a few times a month and on NT4 it was sometimes everyday

 

[Wryel]

That makes sense, lots of places are quite slack about drivers and will be happy to restart the spooler every other day.

 

[Curiosityx]

When you administer a Citrix farm with over 70 printers youll never wish to hear the term spooler ever again, considering that one invalid or badly written driver can take the lot down.