A couple days ago I was printing a bunch of pictures from my laptop to my HP Photosmart 5100c for my father in-law. At one point I had run out of paper and other point had some other minor problem with the printer. After awhile I noticed that my computers CPU appeared to be fairly active even when I wasn’t doing anything so I started troubleshooting a bit to see what was going on.
Troubleshoot With Task Manager Process List:
I first used the Windows Task Manager to see if I could locate a process or group of processes that were active on the system and noticed that there were a ton of HPBOID.EXE and HPBPRO.EXE processes. Below is a view of a large group of each of these processes on my Windows XP laptop even after I was done printing.
End HPBOID.EXE And HPBPRO.EXE Processes:
To resolve the issue I could have simply rebooted my laptop and the hung processes would have been cleared out when Windows shut down. The problem was I was in the middle of working on something else and didn’t want to reboot so I decided instead to just kill the HPBOID.EXE and HPBPRO.EXE processes. All you need to do to stop these processes is highlight the process in the Windows Task Manager Processes tab and click the End Process button in the lower right corner of the Task Manager window. This will display a warning message as displayed in the below image.
If you are in the process of ending a bunch of the HP processes simply agree to the warning by clicking the Yes button. Do this for each instance of the HPBOID.EXE process and the HPBPRO.EXE process. This will cut off the resources being used by the HP printer without having to reboot your computer. It is possible that killing off all of these processes could cause an issue with the printer but if that is the case you could reboot and everything should start functioning properly.
It appears that during the printing process these two processes start up and must have something to do with the print spool or may just be a way to get all of the diagnostic information from the HP printer which in my case is a HP Photosmart 5100c. Either way do not be afraid to end these processes because a reboot will set the printer state back to normal regardless.
