How to dim my laptop further than the default

I just got an Acer aspire one, and I was wondering if it would be possible to dim the screen further than the default.
When I dim it as much as it can go, its reasonably dim, but I'd like to be able to dim it further, in order to preserve battery life, and also because its too bright in a dark room.
Any ideas?

 

All I can think of is a possibility of lowering the overall default brightness within the graphic chipset's driver properties.

For instance, nVidia chipset has brightness control in its nVidia control panel driver software.