Hi Arnie. Calibrating monitors has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Firstly you have to ask yourself why you are doing it? And secondly whether it will improve you imaging workflow even if you did. Most monitors are set for the sRGB colour space yet many amateur photographers using photoshop still insist aRGB to be best for their workflow and upload that space to the web. What they get is insipid colours and they can't understand why.
I have always thought that trying to calibrate a monitor that wasn't intentended for photo editing to be a bit of a nonsense and by and large it is. My reason for saying this is simple: if you buy into a cheap monitor no amount of calibration will make it suitable for image editing, but they are OK for office work and web browsing for which they were intended. So, what does one do to get a good image? The first step is to buy a decent monitor. Pro monitors are really expensive and often outside the budget of most of us. But monitors suited to gaming and video editing are reasonably priced. My choice was an HPw2207, and though a couple of years old is still a cracking wide screen monitor for photo editing. Yes, it needs calibration from time to time, but this is mainly with the gamma. In windows 7 you can easiily adjust the gamma by using the inbuilt tool, but here's a free download that you might find useful:
http://www.calibrize.com/index.html
I also check out my monitor with this free tool:
http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php
I have never had an ounce of trouble with accurate colours on my monitor or prints I have had done from a pro lab. Good luck.