My wife’s new work computer was running slow, so I went in to take a look at it. It’s an HP, Pentium 4, 2.8ish GHz, 512 MB RAM, XP Home. It seems that once the printer has been used during a session, the print spooler (spoolsv.exe) eats up all the CPU time, even after printing is done. Also, the printer pauses for several seconds during printing; it didn’t do this with her old computer. If I stop the spooler service performance improves, but then she can’t print anything. I thought it might be a printer driver problem, so I got the latest one from HP (LaserJet 4000 series), but it wasn’t XP certified and the printer didn’t work with it at all, so I reverted to the standard XP driver. Any thoughts?
Possibilities turned up from googling…
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Stuck print job. I’m guessing you already checked this, but just in case – that’ll take CPU to 100%.
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Incompatibility with certain versions of Novell Netware. Installing an updated version of Netware seems to help.
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Virus/malware of some kind.
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Corrupted software (spoolsv.exe itself). Some reports of fixing the problem with an uninstall and reinstall of the printer drivers.
I googled it first, but had a hard time sorting out the needle from the hay, ya know? 1 and 3 I already thought of. I had her get the latest virus updates for McAfee, and she’s gonna run a full scan tonight. I could also try Adaware and Spybot if that doesn’t work. 2 and 4 hadn’t occured to me, I’ll try those too. Maybe the Clockwork robots got into the system…