Adobe's gamma wizard in your control panel should be sufficient for basic calibration on your monitor without using expensive profiling software/hardware.
Here's a walkthru for it if you need it. We use
eye-one's calibration hardware for our monitors and printers at work. It's nice to just plug a usb device in and let it optically read your monitor directly and tweak the settings. Adjusting your gamma may also help the brightness issue on your older monitor, but that can only so much. Eventually you'll have to relegate it to doing non color-critical work.
Another thing you can do is correct for specific output. I dunno how much movement you'll see from Kinko's output, but if it's relatively consistent, what you can do is make a curve to apply to every file you intend to print.
You'll need to print a target (basically just a bunch of solid color squares that you can use as your baselines -
Kodak's Q-60 works great for this, but it IS a copyrighted image, so you may want to just make your own substitute if you don't feel like shelling out 50 bucks for a piece of media that you'd still have to scan in on a calibrated device). Make sure this target has some indication of a version number or the like on it, because you're going to be printing a lot of these with small changes.
Then you take that printed target and, ideally, you'd read it in on some sort of calibrated color scanning device. On the cheap, your eyes in a sunlit room will suffice.
I dunno how much work you've done with the curve adjustments in Photoshop, but they are essential to the next step.
You need to adjust your target file to compensate for the discrepencies between your calibrated monitor's image of the target and the printed target. The idea here is if your reds have a slight cyan cast in the quarter tones then you need to bump your red quarter tone a bit in the curve. Try to avoid moving too much on the green/magenta curve, as it tends to have a more drastic effect compared to the red/cyan and blue/yellow curves. Once you think you may have compensated for the differences, update your version number, save a copy, and take it to your printer. Repeat this process until you are content that the printer's output of the adjusted file matches your calibrated screen image. Then you can take the curve you've made and apply it to any image you are outputting on that same device, and assuming they aren't running low on toner or something you've got good output!
One thing to make sure is that you are using the same embedded profiles from one computer to another. If you are working in Adobe RGB 98 at home, and the PC at Kinko's is asking to change your file to sRGB, don't let it! Use the embedded profile that you made on your calibrated system. So now you're working with a profile on your file, a profile on your monitor, and a profile (sort of) for your printer. Whee!
Remember when i told you color management was a great big pain in the ass? I'm pretty much a novice who just follows a system set up by my employers who've been doing this for 15 years, and after a year and a half I'm still constantly asking questions. So, hopefully I haven't told you anything blatantly incorrect or managed to confuse the hell out of you.
If you wanna learn more on your own (if I didn't make any damn sense!), a good place to start would be to look in your Photoshop program's help files for a topic labeled something like "Producing Consistent Color". Also, the
ICC's website is a wealth of information of the topic. They have a nice downloadable FAQ on the front page too. If you can get your hand's on a copy of Michael Kieran's
Photoshop Color Correction, it's one of the best book's on the subject.
Good luck, and if you have any more questions, I'll try to be as helpful as possible.
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