LCD Monitors and calibration

I have decided to upgrade my aging CRT monitor to an LCD.
I am doing this as my edits never look 'right' on other peoples monitors.
Is there any reasonably priced calibration system available? At the moment I need to do two edits of each shot I take. One for printing purposes and one for display on my monitor, as each never appears to be correct in the other medium, let alone on anyone else's display.
This really is quite frustrating as it is spoiling my enjoyment of rail photography at the moment and prevents me from sharing/submitting my shots.
Any advice really would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards
Dave Dean

P.S. I apologise to those of you who have read this post on other forums, but the more help I can get the better.

 

Bit of a minefield, as generally the colour on most peoples monitors is pretty grim, default settings are often very cold and blue, particularly noticeable in B&W so a compromise is necessary. I use a spyder which works very well, originally four of us got together at work and shared the cost, after all you only need to use it once a month or so. Word of warning though, if you use Vista, it is supposed to have its own calibration system, which of course dosnt work, so any new profile you load will conflict with the Vista one, resulting in it dumping the new profile, there are work arounds but not ideal.

 

As you've already read, a real minefield made worse by the overwhelming majority of computer users having no idea how to get their monitors set up.
The device that royce229 uses (link here) is probably a bit over the top as far as most users are concerned and does nothing to address the problem of other people's monitors. Certainly, for your own use, these are excellent and not all that expensive. You can get the most basic version for a single monitor for about £60.
They do work, I used to use a similar device at work and it made a big difference to printed results.
Now I no longer have access to that, to make sure I produce consistent results for myself, I just use the simple calibration chart attached. Far from perfect as it does nothing for colour rendering but it's better than nothing. Calibrating colour by eye is not really on!
The solution to the problem of other people's monitors is less easy. I send them the chart and hope for the best!

 

you could try this, at least it won't cost anything if it's no good. It's only a web page with images and instructions.

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/