Digital BW, The Print

I have a HP LD 19 monitor that has its own calibration 'wizard'--which takes up lots of memory by the way!  I've been using it regularly. I tried the Spyder hardware & software but found it worthless, and when I corresponded with the customer service, they told me they weren't surprised as it has a lot of bugs (?!?!). If you have experience with embedded color calibration software with HP or any other monitor, do you think it works OK? I find it is quite accurate, although the brightness values on the prints on my r1800 are darker than on the monitor so I compensate for that.

thanks