Right. Colour management is a big and complicated business, which is why
whole books are devoted to the subject, so I can't really offer you a solution that'll solve all your problems in one small forum post. I can, however, perhaps put you on the right track.
It seems to me that what you're trying to do is match the colours shown on your monitor to the colours produced by your printer. This is a difficult process at the best of times, and, to be brutally honest, you're making life even harder for yourself by using a laptop monitor and a cheap printer that's not geared towards printing professional photographs. You ask for advice on what profiles to use; that advice is: ones made for your monitor and printer. The whole point of colour profiles is that they enable the computer to understand how colours will be reproduced on different pieces of hardware; as a result, every single model of monitor and printer will require a different profile.
Now, there're different ways of acquiring these profiles. Assuming you continue to use the equipment you've got, you basically have these options, in increasing order of colour accuracy and expense:
- Use Adobe Gamma (a utility supplied with Photoshop) to visually adjust your monitor profile, and use printer profiles supplied with the printer driver.
- Use a monitor profiling device to adjust your monitor profile, and use printer profiles supplied with the printer driver.
- Use a monitor and printer profiling device kit to produce profiles for both devices. (I also have one of these kits for sale here.)
The first option isn't really recommended at all, but it is of course free. The second option may be a good compromise, depending on the quality of your printer ICC profiles - if they're decent, then once you've calibrated your monitor you might get reasonable matches of colour. However, to ensure a proper fully-colour-managed workflow, you do need something like the third option, so that the computer knows the precise chromatic idiosyncrasies of both your monitor and printer, and can deal with them accordingly. Bear in mind though that even this doesn't guarantee perfectly-matched colours... but it does at least give you a much better chance of getting them where possible.
