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Windows: spoolsv.exe Using 99% CPU December 18, 2006

Posted by devhen in Windows.
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I don’t find myself interested in Windows very often, or any proprietary operating system for that matter, but I ran into this problem on one of the computers in our office and thought I would share the solution. If you come across the problem of spoolsv.exe using 99% CPU usage, never fear. There is a solution. And its a rather easy one. Click here for the fix. Thanks to Tim for his journal entry pointing this out.

Comments»

1. Alan - November 26, 2007

very helpful

2. remus - December 19, 2007

I have other kind of problem:one of the pc in a network says that ’spooler subsystem app has encountered a problem’ and it has to close ,that with ’send/don’t send’,and the printer doesn’t work at all,and we can’t even open the folder ‘printer and faxes from”control panel.Could give me an advice,please?

3. Robert - December 29, 2007

IT CAME BACK YOU Douchebag!
YOU SUCK FAT COCK

4. Mike - January 30, 2008

very helpful
thank you

5. mahdi - June 12, 2008

Hi Dear
CAn you say me how we can rely on a such comment like you please?

6. Ralph - July 15, 2008

I had this problem too (spoolsv.exe taking up 99-100% of cpu) and found your post.

I also found this post which explains the issue very helpfully,
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000914.htm

7. Te - August 7, 2008

So simple. Thanks a lot.
Thanks,
-Te

8. Ray J - September 13, 2008

Thanks, works great now. As for Robert, get a Tech, then get a life!

9. RUSSIAN BEAR - September 27, 2008

I WAS SOOOO PISSSED when this fuc88ing thing happened
Read your tips and it helped!!! ..I owe U a bottle of VODKA

10. leonardo gianni - October 12, 2008

thank you

11. Derek - November 12, 2008

All you need to do is “end process tree” the process and then attempt your print job again. that what i did and no problems and works fine now.

12. fps_dean - November 13, 2008

lol if spoolsv uses 100% resources, unless you’re on a pentium 1 and I have no idea how you’d ever see your desktop, then what you have is not the windows process but a virus disguised as the windows process.

13. Amol - December 30, 2008

Thnaks a lot…it worked well

14. prashanth - February 4, 2009

Thank a lot, So simple, it worked well

15. neal - February 18, 2009

WOW!!! Far Out

Thanks

16. Rob - April 29, 2009

Worked like a charm and made me look like a tech hero. Thanks very much

17. umer ch - May 3, 2009

this will work
go to control panal,
open administarive tools.
click on services
go down to print spooler
click on startup type and click disable
then under it click on stop
then click on the recovery tab at the top
change all to take no action
and presto no more problems
do a full system scan with any antivirus just to make sure

18. Wolfie - September 3, 2009

It Does NOT work – keeps coming back again.

19. Kevin Cotreau - November 4, 2009

I had a very similar problem with every workstation in a network environment. Spoolsv.exe was eating the CPU cycles and more.

The issues were that the repeated tries to communicate with the server by spoolsv.exe were killing the performance of the workstations (50-99% utilization), and they were eating up the bandwidth on a gigabit network. Outlook’s very slow connecting to Exchange was an obvious sign of the loss of bandwidth.

The issue in my case was a corrupted printer on the server, and in particular, it was something to do with the network path (\\servername\printer).

The resolution was that I ultimately killed the printer on the server. Then on each workstation killed spoolsv.exe, deleted the printer that was trying to get to the server, then restarted the spooler service.

At that point, reinstalling the printer on both server and workstations fixed everything.

For those not in a corporate network environment, I do recommend that you stop the spooler service and clean out the \windows\system32\spool\printers folder, but then also install and run Spybot for “usage tracks”.

This deletion of usage tracks by Spybot can fix this type of ghost connection problem. I have found it to be especially helpful when a computer is trying to connect to a server that is no longer there (renamed or removed).

All the best,

Kevin Cotreau
MCSE+I, MCNE

20. Daryll - November 9, 2009

what does spoolsv.exe do? is it helpful or is it harmful? it only uses the cpu 50% but i am concerned if it’s a threat to my pc….if i disable it i might just mess things up…..maybe i cant be able to print