So I got this printer and .....,..... (color management for free)

What you see (on the monitor) is rarely very close to what you get on the paper. Good enough for casual use, since perception is very adaptive, but not if you are particularly fussy about shades of difference.

So, one of the technical challenges for photographers today is making prints that actually look like you want them to, and being able to be sure that what you see on the monitor is reasonably close to what others will see and what the printer will print. Newer monitors are usually pretty accurate, but the more important subtle differences are, and the older the monitor, the more difficult this matching becomes. Color Management software is designed to help solve this problem, but the cost is quite high generally and most "tutorials" tend to be obscure to the novice.

One exception on both counts, which combines free open source software and a very easily understood and useful website, is at http://www.scarse.org/ . If you are shooting and distributing via digital files, you don't need to worry about it, but if you expect to control what the prints will look like, you'll need to deal with these issues. So, check out the site, if it looks like too much trouble, just bookmark it for future reference.

Anyway, this as a free and helpful resource for those who can use it.

(Edit to add) It's pretty primitive at this stage, but if you have more time than money running the software (via command line) might be worth the trouble, but the basic information and calibration steps are worth a read, in any case.

From a quick look at the site, it appears that this is for calibration of film scanners, not getting monitors and printers to work together.

I used to have all sorts of trouble getting prints that matched what I was seeing on the monitor. Then I did a quick'n'dirty calibration of the monitor with Adobe Gamma, and, when printing, instructed Photoshop to let the printer handle color management rather than trying to do it from within Photoshop. There was a tremendous improvement in results -- not 100%, but as good if not better than using Costco's Fuji film printers (which come highly recommended by some professionals I know).

and gave up. I use two monitors, one very cheap and pretty old and the other pretty cheap and very old (the better one). Neither may be adequate. I've managed to get the monitor image of the scanned slides and varous test images to look pretty much like they should (moreso on the better one) by tweaking the video card controls, and the printer output to match the monitor fairly well by color correction sttings on the printer, but althought the results are reasonable the methods are clunky. The printer driver preview is useless (it looks nothing like either the monitor image (too light) or the print (too dark)), but the preview within Picture Windows Pro is very close. It works, but I have no idea what a third party might print from those files.