What is the latest firmware for the Work Centre 7845 ?

[andymbody]

Yes, it's a mess. Not sure why either.

The good news is that it has been fairly consistant (with a few exceptions) on many models being released in the past few years. And when you know the coding scheme, you can glance at the version number and have a good idea when it was written/released (usually).

[Gerald]

Thank you for the clarification - wow, that is an extremely confusing version number scheme.

I will keep this explanation in mind for future upgrades, thank you again.

[andymbody]

Also... for clarification...

The tech did indeed apply an upgrade (as he said) from 073.040.075.34540 (2015-2016) to 073.040.058.25300 (2018). It was not the latest version available, but he may have been more comfortable with this version based on his experience with newer versions.

[andymbody]

Gerald,

To answer your question and for future reference...

The sw date for your product is encoded in the sw version itself, if you know what to look for...

The first 3 digits are the major SW platform (72-75 recently), the next 3 digits are the product code (040 for 7845/55).

The 6th digit from the right is the year (only the 6th digit). For instance in this version (075.040.011.11100), the sixth digit is a 1, which indicates 2021. The next 3 digits to the right of the year digit are the day of that year. In this case, the 111 day of 2021 (April 21). There are many ones in this version so lets look at the other version that you mentioned to make it more clear.

The version that the tech installed (073.040.058.25300) would be dated 253 days into 2018. Which would be September 10, 2018. This date code does not necessarily reflect the release date in all cases, but it can give you a good idea of the appoximate date of the software creation for comparison purposes.

You can ignore the rest of the digits.

Andy

[Gerald]

Final update: was able to repair the device today with help from support company. Turns out the incompetent hardware technician had

a) left the device in a diagnotics mode that had to be manually exited via a hidden menu
b) had screwed up the SNMP GET-Community-Name and SNMP SET-Community-Name which we had to manually set again to public / private (probably happened due to his unintentional firmware downgrade)

Then we updated to the latest firmware 075.040.011.11100, support was very surprised I already had this on hand :-)

Now both printing and automatic-toner-supply-ordering via XDA works again.

[Gerald]

Thank you, this helped quite a lot. I've now also found a changelog which revealed when the currently installed version 073.040.058.25300 was released (in Sept 2018)

I think the problem why I was not able to find any release notes for 073.040.058.25300 is that you need to replace the second number with xxx when searching or better just search for "058.25300", since this second number perhaps denotes a machine number or something and the release note information is generic across all machines. So now I at least know that this "technician" installed a firmware that is close to three years old - great job :-)

I had one remaining question: How do I discover which firmware version was on it previously? I had planned to find old log files to download on the printer somewhere, but luckily I was able to solve this much easier: The incredibly incompetent Xerox technician (which was only there only to replace a defective part!) has so totally screwed up the printer that the Xerox Device Agent is also no longer able to update the data... And this allows me to see the firmware version number the Xerox WC7845 had when it was last working: 075.040.000.02300

A bit of googling then reveals this is from Feb 2020 - which also makes sense since the printer was probably set up there in April 2020.

So this amazing technician who was only supposed to replace a defective part downgraded our machine from a Feb 2020 firmware to a Sept 2018 firmware and then refused to fix it after printing from ALL computers had stopped working ("I'm only here to exchange parts, software is not my problem" were his exact words).

Thanks for your help George850650-XRXN, you saved my day, suddenly all the problems make sense :-)

[George850650-XRXN]

Gerald,

Go to Xerox Security at  https://security.business.xerox.com/en-us/ On the right hand side there is a link to download a Software Release Quick Look up table with links to the Firmware.

The latest firmware (05/21) for the WC7845 is 075.040.011.11100.

I hope this helps.

 

[Gerald]

A technician has installed/updated our WC7845 to firmware version

073.040.058.25300

and now bidirectional communication via the "lp" or "port 9100" printer queue does not work anymore.
Can someone please tell me:

a) Is there some way to find out when this version was released?
b) is this the latest version? On the download page I can find a version 073.040.075.34540 which presumably has a release date from 06/2016. Am I correct that the version that the technician installed is ancient? The version number seems lower, but he installed this a few days ago and claimed it was an upgrade. Unfortunately I don't know what version was installed before his upgrade, but it could not have been this old because the printer was upgraded when it was moved to this location about ~2 years ago.
c) if this is not the latest version which version is the latest one any why can't I find newer versions that from 06/2016?

Thank you very much in advance everyone, i'm totally stuck and our support company is EXTREMELY unhelpful. The basically told us to manually disable bidirectional communication on all computers... Which was never necessary for ANY Xerox Printer (and I've seen a couple).