No more fooling with colors in your bitmapped-editing program until Aunt Martha's face looks decidedly bilious on the monitor to get satisfying results on the printer. Good color management requires using properly adjusted hardware and software. Of the software, the most critical is using an operating system that supports system-wide color management. Currently, Windows 98 and Windows Me are the systems most people use where color management is built in. If you are running Windows 95, everything becomes more complicated, but good device drivers and software help make it much easier.
Few people have printers that do color management in hardware.
In nearly all cases, the printer device driver will control everything, so we'll deal with the color management issues when discussing software. Higher end monitors allow color management through internal settings, but since the settings change based on monitor age and ambient light, most of the adjustments stay in software. The final component then is your application software. If it does not support color management, you have to do more work. If it does support color management, things become much easier.