Not your average brightness problem

I've been trying to get this problem fixed for about 3 days and nobody knows how to fix this. Hopefully you can help me. My brightness won't do anything but be REALLY REALLY dark, and be averagely dim, and I can toggle this by hitting fn+f7. Normally, like on Vista (if you can call that normal) fn+f6 or fn+f5 would toggle my brightness. ALL of my other function keys (volume, media, toggle scr lk, etc.) are working. So it's weird. I know someone else has this problem but aren't being as annoying about it as I am.

What I have already tried:
-gamma control with "displaycalibrator"

-the tutorial "howto" here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=767374 which is the same as the ubuntu geek method, when I hit fn+up, my music player stops playing, fn down, it pauses/plays. That's how it normally works in Windows, so it probably isn't mapping the brightness over the normal function.

-The "ugly hack" described in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ght=brightness
^ Im not sure why that doesn't work, it just doesn't...

-One thing I'd like to try (it seemed bright, but I was in a bright room) was I entered the gnome power management config(I forgot the command! It's something like gkconfig?) So I need to be reminded of that enter-gnomeconfig-command...

-The brightness applet on the panel does nothing.

- I was suggested on ubuntuforums to do the following:
CODE
iago@NISUS:~$ echo 'for i in /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness; do echo 10 > $i; done' > brightness
iago@NISUS:~$
iago@NISUS:~$ chmod +x brightness
iago@NISUS:~$
iago@NISUS:~$ sudo ./brightness
iago@NISUS:~$ brightness
/usr/local/bin/brightness: line 1: /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness: Permission denied
/usr/local/bin/brightness: line 1: /sys/class/backlight/asus-laptop/brightness: Permission denied
Brightness set to
iago@NISUS:~$ sudo brightness
Brightness set to
iago@NISUS:~$ sudo brightness 10
Brightness set to 10
iago@NISUS:~$ sudo brightness 1
Brightness set to 1
iago@NISUS:~$ sudo brightness 1000
Brightness set to 1000
iago@NISUS:~$
iago@NISUS:~$

CODE

And it doesn't change my brightness. Secondly, one problem with what the previous guy gave me is there is no /sys/class/backlight/brightness, on my laptop it goes /sys/class/backlight/asus-laptop/brightness, there's also /max-brightness, and other tings in asus-laptop. I cant even open it in gedit, though. The little documents in my asus-laptop brightness do change with his commands, but it doesn't effect my brightness

-I found an application called "monitor settings" but it doesnt work. It gives me the following error: "No monitor supporting DDC/CI available. If your graphics card need it, please check all the required kernel modules are loaded (12c-dev, and your framebuffer driver).

-I am getting nauseous, I have to strain to read the screen because it's so dark