Hello. I recently purchased an NEC 2490wuxi LCD monitor and an HP Desktop running 64-bit Vista and an NVidia GeForce 8500 GT graphics card for my home photography business. I am relatively new to color management, since I have not been a photographer for very long, and I need some guidance on how to get started, basically from the very beginning. I don't even have Photoshop installed on this new machine yet, so there are no issues with Adobe Gamma running, but I just really don't know where to begin.
I ordered the Spyder3Elite last week, and I need a little help understanding how the process works.
1) Before calibrating the monitor, what settings do I need to change in Windows? I see that Vista has a new, and very confusing color management system - WCS. There are a ridiculous number of menus with various choices, and i've heard that some things need to be set so that Vista doesn't automatically override the new profile you create with the calibration software at startup. Also, do I need to change anything in the NVidia settings? I have read that I am supposed to disable "color correction" under NVidia.
2) Am I supposed to keep the actual monitor settings at the factory defaults, or am I supposed to make changes before I run the calibration? Specifically, am I supposed to change the color mode from Native to sRGB (6500), change the luminosity to around 120 cd/m2 or so, and make sure the gamma is set at 2.2? What about contrast, etc? Exactly what should I change on the monitor before calibrating?
3) Do I even need to calibrate this monitor, since I could just set the color to SRGB, set the gamma to 2.2, and set the luminosity to 120 (recommended settings for most photographers doing color work)?
I know that I have WAY too many questions, but any and all help would be greatly appreciated. I am very new to this, but since I have made such a big investment in all of this hardware, I want to make sure that i'm doing everything correctly, right from the start. I don't want to have missed a step, or have something else in the background (i.e. Vista, NVidia, etc) to interfering with what I do.
Thank you so much! 
