Whites on Laptop Screen

I have one old laptop that I have used forever to edit photos. At this point I do mainly casual web posting and not a ton of printing. My laptop hard drive is dying I think.

I have access to another laptop, but a photo that looks good on the older laptop looks blown out on the newer laptop. Adjusting the brightness does not seem to help. I know that a laptop is not the best thing to use to edit photos, but I like it for convenience. The time that I have to edit is while relaxing on the couch in the evenings.

If I buy a calibration setup, would that be sufficient for my laptop screen - to make the whites easier to manage?

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Nathan

I'll let folks more familiar with non-Mac speak for that side, but in all my computers screen brightness is an issue. My calibration rig allows me to adjust that, but it's truly only accurate for the setting that I'm in at the moment I do my calibration. I can see the effects of varying ambient light in the editing results, no matter how recently or how well I calibrated. It would be interesting to put the second laptop right alongside yours on your couch in the evening. I bet the second one is going to look brighter. You can probably compensate with a brightness adjustment to your own, but IIRC, screens on laptops tend to dim with time just as they did with the "old" CRT desktop monitors. Over the 10 years I've used the LaCie CRT monitor I have on this computer, brightness adjustments have slowly worked upwards. IIRC, it calibrated to a brightness setting of around 25% when new. My recent calibration ended up with a 45% brightness setting.

There may be other factors at work, but I find screen brightness settings to be an even bigger challenge to manage than viewing angle with laptops.

My XP laptop is calibrated with G?M Eye One and I still get frustrated with the varying colors with varying viewing angles. Brightness is about 30% when calibrated.