This problem has been going on for a quite some time, but I just never bothered to make an attempt to fix it because this is my parents computer. Well, I'm not really sure what happened, but our monitor's brightness is very low. On the monitor settings, I have the brightness turned to 100, which is all the way up. and the contrast also has to be all the way up in order to read text on some web pages. I never really bothered to fix this, since in windows i could just go into the nvidia settings and turn the brightness up nice and high and adjust the contrast accordingly, but now that i'm using ubuntu on this pc, there are no settings to turn the birghtness up, so it's really dark. I don't have any idea what could be wrong here, so any help would be much appreciated. thanks in advance. gavin.