My First Calibration - Partial Success?

My Spyder3Elite arrived today! Not a day too soon...

In lieu of a long step-by-step rundown of the "out of box experience", let me just say it was easy, a tad time-consuming, well worth it, but not perfect. Here's what I was trying to do:

I have my laptop (on which I run Adobe Lightroom) attached to a desktop monitor as a "proofing" screen. In Windows parlance, I'm running two monitors using "extended desktop". The primary monitor is my laptop, and the proofing happens on the extended desktop (large monitor on my desk). The two images used to be hopelessly not similar. Now they are tolerably almost similar, and I think I can trust the desktop monitor once again.

My Spyder hanging on my desktop's monitor
(ignore the gold cast - it's a function of my phone's lousy white balance)

Here's what I learned:

• Michael Riechmann and Jeff Schewe were absolutely right - you can't do anything serious related to color when using a laptop's monitor. Not only does mine have a HUGE difference in apparent luminosity depending on vertical viewing angle (the tilt of the screen), but its "gamut" is not sufficient to fully represent the sRGB color space! My desktop monitor, on the other hand, covers sRGB reasonably well.

Note how the red plot (my desktop monitor) matches the green sRGB plot
...but the laptop's monitor falls well short

• My first attempt at calibration didn't get both monitors to look the same. When I tried "recal" in a workflow that was designed to match the two, it came closer - but not perfect. Perhaps this is due to the difference above - my little laptop monitor is trying as hard as it can to reproduce reds, but is failing - so the desktop more accurately displays the red tones.
  
• If I want to do any SERIOUS color prep for fine art prints, then I'd better save up to buy a really good monitor that can cover the AdobeRGB (or better) color space - otherwise, I'll never know what I'm adjusting and the prints will be hit or miss.

The next experiment, of course, is to see how well all of this matches print output at my favorite lab. THAT part of the "colour" management workflow I haven't studied enough yet (how do I tell Lightroom what the printer's profile is when I'm not printing directly?). Stay tuned...