I have a bit of a problem on Win7 + EeePC (Intel onboard graphics). The brightness/gamma setting won't actually do much. If I change the setting, the screen gets darker or brighter for a moment before reverting to a very dark state - so it basically works, but the game resets it somehow. In windowed mode, the brightness setting actually has no effect whatsoever.

Any ideas?

Are you using the "vanilla" game or the DirectX10 renderer? With the latest, if you activate HDR (maybe it's on by default), brightness values will dynamically change according to the ambient lighting. Changing gamma in the options will only adjust the general brightness for the original "values", and then the renderer will re-apply others (after a few seconds), usually much darker (I find the effect a bit "raw" myself, although it really adds to the game in most places). If you want to easily know if HDR is on, look at a light and you should be "dazzled", then brightness will lower progressively.

As for windowed mode, usually playing a game this way makes it render the image with your desktop brightness - in-game gamma slider won't work.

Vanilla game, straight out of the box.

Thanks for suggesting the alternate renderers, I completely forgot about them. Got the new OpenGL renderer and it seems to work better than DirectX for some reason. Not sure if the netbook is powerful enough to do HDR, because if I had the option, I would settle to no less than tons and tons of bloom. =)

Also thanks for suggesting the desktop brightness settings. I used the graphics card config tool to bump up my overall gamma, and that seems to work fine and the game is tolerably brighter now. Can just change it back when I'm done.