need help on adjusting the brightness on my video card

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I have a Hercules Geforce2MX with Nvidia 23.11 drivers installed in WinXP. I have the problem of all my games being dark as sh**! I can not figure out how to turn up the brightness for my computer. My monitor's brightness control is all the way up, and I have looked in the display settings and advanced settings for a brightness control, but nothing works. In most games, I can turn up the brightness within the game itself, but I want to be able to do this within Windows so that all programs benenfit. I'm tired of not being able to see anything in the games when I should. Is there any 3rd party software that would do the trick? Thanks for any help.