Ok, I see now that I was not crazy in saying "Where the heck are these guys getting their links from, I just keep reaching the same paid firmware dead end"
In any event, I think that my firmware is only 2 generations old (pretty sure it's version _5 or _7 now) and as I understand it, all drivers up to Win7 64 still work on my version, although I am still using a Win 7 32bit machine. Still, it would be nice to get the very newest firmware and see if the lingering couple of issues with the Z can be addressed (those being the curious uneven print margin issue, which I have finally fixed by experimenting with certain margin settings, and the slow PS6 printing interface, which I intend to address someday with a Qimage purchase).
I have no plans to get rid of the Z3100 now that I have located such a great 3rd party service office near Mississauga, Ontario, since I can't bear the thought of changing out inks, dealing with clogs or profiling paper without a spectrometer. I'll gladly suffer with my little glitches. When the z3100 finally dies, I'll simply buy a replacement z3200, or z3300, assuming they are true to their word and stay in the fine art photo business. That's the big "if" (I'm a bit touchy about that subject right now, having purchased the entire Olympus classic 4/3 SHG series of lenses over the past decade on a company promise to keep classic 4/3 going....but I digress...;-))
Still, that's a pretty sad state of affairs for HP to charge for the firmware upgrades, which are, when you think about it, fixes to its own faulty firmware. I certainly like the idea of a firmware-share on the wiki sites!
Leigh
zippski