How to manually uninstall a printer driver in Windows

Came across an interesting issue today where I was unable to remove the printer drivers. I got the message that the printer is in use and therefore cannot delete the drivers.

Here’s what I did to get the printer:

  1. Goto ‘Services’ under ‘Administrative Tools’, and restart the ‘Printer Spooler Service’.
  2. Click the Start menu and in the search field type ‘printui /s /t2‘ (without the quotes), and then press Enter or click it in the search list.
  3. You should see a dialog box pop up.
  4. Select the appropriate printer driver you are trying to uninstall and click ‘Delete’ or ‘Remove’.
  5. Delete the printer from ‘Devices and Printers’ in Control Panel.

I have able to remove the corrupted drivers and then install the new drivers successfully.