Auto-restart is the most useful — and most abused — setting in spooler repair. This guide sets it up properly and draws the honest line between a safety net and a solution.
Every spooler crash leaves users staring at an offline printer until someone restarts the service. The Recovery tab can do that restart automatically — and this guide sets it the careful way (restart twice, then stop hiding it), shows the command-line version, and explains the one truth about it: it buys time, it does not fix drivers.
This setup keeps users printing through a crash — and quietly counts them for you in the Reset fail count field. A rising count is a repair bill coming due.
Every Windows service has a Recovery tab in its properties. It tells Windows what to do when the service fails: take no action, restart the service, run a program, or restart the computer. For the Print Spooler you can set a different answer for the first failure, the second failure, and every failure after that.
Used well, this turns a crash from an office emergency into a one-minute pause. Used carelessly, it hides a broken driver for months. The difference is whether you also do the real repair.
services.msc, double-click Print Spooler, open the Recovery tabFor a technician setting up several PCs, the command line version is copy-paste ready. Run it in an administrator Command Prompt:
sc failure Spooler reset= 86400 actions= restart/60000/restart/60000/restart/60000
In plain words: if the Spooler fails, wait 60 seconds and restart it, up to three times, and reset that counter after 86400 seconds (one day). Note the spaces after each = — with sc.exe they are required, not a mistake. Verify the result any time with sc qfailure Spooler.
Be clear-eyed about the trade. Auto-restart restores printing in a minute — and also reloads the same bad job or the same bad driver that just crashed the service. Some crashes will simply recur on a loop of quiet restarts, a few times a day, eroding trust in the printer and filling the Event log.
Worse, one class of crash survives the restart completely: a poisoned job in the spool folder crashes the spooler at every start, so the recovery setting produces an endless stop-start cycle until someone clears the folder. The bandage cannot reach that cause at all.
Set recovery options on any PC where printing matters — especially a shared print host — and read the fail count and the Event log weekly until the crashes stop entirely. The setting's counter is a measurement tool: if it keeps climbing, you still have a driver or job problem to repair.
The goal is a spooler that never needs its recovery setting. When the count stays at zero for a month, the bandage has done its job and the cure is real.
The full print spooler repair — finding the real culprit and stopping the crash loop — is shown step by step in the video.
▶️ Watch Full VideoRestart the Service for the first and second failure, with a 1-minute delay, Take No Action for subsequent failures, and reset the fail count after 1 day. That combination rides through a stray crash, survives a second, and refuses to hide a third — the point where a human should look.
Almost always the spaces. sc.exe demands a space after each equals sign: reset= 86400 and actions= restart/60000 are correct, while reset=86400 fails. Copy the command exactly as shown, spaces included, and run it from an administrator Command Prompt.
Because the crash is still happening — the restart only hides it. The bad job or driver keeps killing the service, some crashes loop endlessly against a stuck job, and the underlying fault can worsen. Auto-restart buys calm while you repair the cause; it is not the repair.