Q. Sometimes I want the printer to stop printing and all I can do is turn it off. Then when I turn it on again, it starts printing again. How do I stop printing?

A. The best way to stop an unwanted print job is to look for the little printer icon on your task bar (usually the bottom right hand corner of your screen). It appears when there are items being sent to the printer - print jobs.

If you double-click on that icon, a printer status box appears and you can view the print job(s) that are going to the printer. I say "jobs" because when you print something, it goes to an area of your hard disk called a print queue and is spooled out to the printer when the printer can accept more pages.

The printer dialog box lets you cancel current and pending jobs, rearrange the order of jobs (maybe you want a one-pager to print before the 100 page report) and delete print jobs.

Most printers have some internal memory to make the printing process faster. Computers are much faster than printers and you wouldn't want to sit and stare at your PC while an entire document printed.

When you send some pages to the printer, as many pages as possible are stored in the printer's internal memory. So even if you kill the print job on your PC, some of the pages may already be in the printer's memory and will continue to print. Turning the printer off for a few seconds usually clears this.

As you may have noticed, if you just shut down the PC, the print job may appear again because it still exists in the print queue waiting for the printer to call for it. So make sure you kill the print job as described above.

Answered by Tech Expert Dan Hanson