the functional components and data passed between a software application 10 and a printer 6 according to the present invention one difference between the block diagram shown in fig4 and that shown in fig2 is a module 16 the module 16 is an executable program and corresponds to the printer driver 12 the module 16 may be loaded onto the computer 2 via a computer storage medium such as a cd rom tape disk or memory chip card or the internet i e by downloading the module 16 fig4 also illustrates snmp commands 17 used by to module 16 to retrieve the available printer options provided with the printer and a registry 15 which is a system specific database in which computer printer information is stored the module 16 executes snmp commands 17 to retrieve printer information from the printer 6 via a network interface card nic 19 of the computer 2 the network 5 and the nic 11 of the printer 6 this retrieved information is then used to update the internal data structures of the printer driver for example by using standard library functions provided with a programming language and is stored in the registry 15 the present invention is not limited to snmp and other network protocols may be used however for simplicity purposes the present invention will be described with reference to snmp in addition fig4 illustrates the computer 2 connected to the.