An up-to-date printer driver. A printer driver is a program that enables your computer to talk to your printer: Your printer won't work properly without one. Drivers also give you control over the printer's output quality, graphics handling and other features. While many printers can use drivers designed for other popular machines, you'll need one specifically designed for your printer to take advantage of all the goodies -- like pre-installed fonts -- that it has to offer.

Printer manufacturers usually ship drivers on disks with their machines. Unfortunately, the drivers that ship with the newest models are sometimes buggy or incomplete. Before you buy a printer, make sure it includes the proper driver for the operating system you're running on your computer.

If your printer works slower than it should, or if it behaves oddly, you may need an updated driver. Most printer makers will send you the latest and greatest if you call their technical support number. If you have a modem, you can also download drivers from manufacturers' bulletin boards, the major online services or the World Wide Web.

Graphics software. If you really want to see what your printer can do, hook it up to a good graphics program and watch it go to work.

Graphics programs designed for kids will transform them into budding artists who can produce drawings, greeting cards, party invitations, banners, stickers, buttons and just about anything else. Your only concern is going bankrupt replacing the printer's ink cartridges.

Some programs, such as KidPix and Creative Artist, are designed specifically for younger children. Others, such as PrintShop and PrintMaster Gold, have grown-ups in mind, too. You can use them to create terrific signs, fliers, brochures, business cards, tickets, coupons and certificates for business use.

For more serious work, you may want to try programs such as Photoshop, Fractal Painter, Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. These are expensive programs designed for graphic artists, and they'll let you do anything to images -- from editing photographs to warping images and creating your own paintbrush effects.

You can print out the creations you fashion with these programs directly, or save them in a format that can be used with word processors or desktop publishing software.

Desktop publishing software. While word processors are fine for most business jobs, if you want to create fancy brochures, newsletters or documents that have a heavy mix of text and graphics, you'll want a desktop publishing program.

These programs treat documents as a series of frames for text and graphics. The arrangement of these elements can be customized easily, including making text flow around graphics and linking separate frames of text, even if these frames are on different pages. That way, you can start an article on Page 1 of your newsletter and continue it on Page 4.

For heavy-duty publishing, consider an industrial-strength program such as PageMaker or Quark XPress. They're expensive, but they can turn out everything from a brochure or an illustrated book to a broadsheet newspaper page, complete with high-resolution graphics and color separations. If your aspirations are more modest, try an inexpensive program such as Microsoft Publisher. While lighter-weight programs don't have all the typesetting and graphical controls of the big boys, they make it very easy to turn out documents that make you look like a pro.

Specialty papers. If your image is important to you, an inexpensive desktop printer and some fancy paper can work wonders.

For starters, hunt down some professional letterhead. You'll find a wide variety of paper stock with full-color, preprinted borders, designs and washes that would be outrageously expensive to produce on a custom basis. Your printer adds black-and-white text, and the overall result looks like a high-priced, professional print job.

Likewise, if you shop around, you can find beautiful pre-printed stock for business cards, postcards, invitations, brochures, greeting cards, certificates and coupons.

For the best color reproduction with ink jet printers, particularly of photos, look for specially coated paper or thick, semi-gloss "photo stock."