If your having to lean so close to see what your doing then give some calibration software a go. Or at least play with the contrast / brightness on the LCD display so you can see your work (unless this is what you meant by "crappy LCD").
Poser lighting does not help much to see what you end up with either.
I am quite fortunate in that on my desktop the Nvidia card (one of the old ancient and basic Quadro4 type), has controls so I can manually adjust colour settings. Not being at my laptop (and being short of memory), I can't remember what the built in ATI card has for adjustments (I have a hacked driver that lets me play with certain settings). My eyes are different to everyone elses so I adjust for me (I know my renders come out funny).