Computer Repair Experts in Phoenix, Arizona. my PC Techs Presents:

Are you experiencing problems with your HP printers, especially HP LaserJet printers, where they are constantly rebooting over and over? If you look closely at the screen just before the reboot you may see a message pop up “Service Error 79”.

We have noticed this happening in a few offices, where all of the HP printers on a network would reboot over and over and pop-up the Service Error 79 message. We tried all of the recommended steps we could find, such as:

• Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in
• Updating the printer firmware
• Restoring to factory defaults
• Cleaning out everything in the print queue from all network attached computers
• Turning off all computers on the network
• Changing IP from static to DHCP and back again

None of the above steps fixed the issue. However, we did notice that the printers would reboot over and over again and crash with the Service Error 79 message only when plugged in with an ethernet cable or if they were connected to Wi-Fi. When taking them off the network they did not reboot. When plugging them into a computer directly with a USB cable they did not reboot.

We’re talking about a mix of different LaserJet printers, at least 4 different models were doing the same thing.

Finally, we found out that a single setting on the printers was causing this. We went into the webpage for the printer, into the network settings, advanced, and disabled the “WS Discovery” service. It took several tries because we’d have to pause while navigating the site each time the printer rebooted (once every 10 seconds or so).

But ultimately if you wait until right after the printer reboots and comes online, then check mark the box to turn off WS Discovery and apply, it should fix the issue.

So far we’ve applied this “fix” to several HP printers and it has solved the issue in all cases.