I've just put my old laptop out to pasture since it appeared to be running out of steam. I've replaced it with a Dell Vostro which includes a dedicated nVidia graphics card. The old one use an ATI card.

I don't really use the laptop for image processing - only for organising images when I'm away - but I like to have the screen setup correctly, so I run the Eye-One Display 2 on it.

Laptops are not easy to set up anyway and the Vostro lacks seperate Brightness/Contrast controls. It just has Brightness which is a very course control.

The problem arose that the calibration and profile that the Eye-One produced just didn't look right. The old laptop was fine. Digging into the problem I found that the nVidia driver and control panel where screwing things up. It also appears to cause problems for some folks running Lightroom - which either hangs or crashes.

The solution was to remove the Nvidia control panel items from the WinXP startup list. After this the Eye-one profile got loaded correctly and things are now fine.

So, if your having problems calibrating and profiling your laptop check and see if you have an nVidia graphics card.

Colin
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Some good info there Colin. I never calibrated my laptop and it's all I use (17" screen). My desktop runs Windows 98 and has only 8Gb... time to upgrade. I seem to get true enough reproduction when I print. so I'm not really worried about it now, but when I go to make a photo book I'll want to make sure they come out the way I want. So I'll be looking to get some calibration software... especially since I'm a bit Red/Green colorblind.