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Have you checked the web site of the manufacturer for downloads: colour profiles? Installing a good colour profile can make all the difference. I think most Dell monitors are Samsung, so their site may be worth a look too. My LCD looks terrible without the correct colour profile. The graphics driver should make almost no difference, and remember that for still graphics, your graphics card does nothing but sinc and dig to analog (if you're not using DVI), still and desktop colour management and layout is basically an operating system, CPU function.
If it still doesn't look pretty, there are various free apps for colour balancing your system available for download. Most LCDs should look fine for viewing, they aren't reference standard and people tend to have trouble making colour profiles that balance screen to print, with the printer's colour profile. I think I've seen that big Dell working, and it was colour balanced very nicely (better than my 19 mitsubishi LCD), so it's a tweek thing IMO. Most high end graphics pros are still using reference standard CRTs, but these are nothing like the CRTs people usually bought for home use anyway. A 21 Sony reference CRT still retails just under $3000 (and are still available) and produces colour and definition good enough to be differentiable by those one in a billion wierdos that can see an extra 500 shades of grey scale. LCDs are pretty nearly as good as home use CRTs, and often better. It'll probably be a matter of getting used to the settings and getting the system tweeked for the new hardware.
One thing to take note of is that many of the extremely high contrast ratio LCD monitors achieve this by overdriving the panel. It has no purpose and looks nasty, but lets them advertise it as ridiculously high contrast monitor, which looks good the add. You don't really want the brightess up that high; not good for your eyes, not good for the monitor (LCDs can still burn in an after image, just not as fast as CRT and plasma). Overdriving the panel to achieve high contrast is basically only useful for office applications in an overly bright viewing environment.
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