Monitor hurting eyes?

So I recently encountered an odd problem. I've been using the same monitor for probably about 2 years and never had trouble (24" Samsung SyncMaster 2433BW).

What happened is that a month or so ago, I had to mess with the graphics settings on one of my games (TF2) in order to play it. Ever since then, whenever I played the game, my eyes would start to hurt and It just seemed like something was wrong, but it still 'looked' fine.

Few weeks later I decided to re-install WoW on my comp. After messing with all the settings...same thing, eyes were hurting and light-headed/weird feeling.

After that I installed the latest drivers for my video card (GeForce 275) and it didn't change anything. Now my problem is that yesterday I was looking around all my video settings in my Nvidia control panel along with windows settings and playing with the brightness on my monitor (lowered it some). After I did this, now my desktop/surfing the net is making my eyes hurt and messing with my head.

I have no clue whats going on and can't think of what to do, so I figured I would see if anyone had an insight. I tried searching for others who had similar problems, but most seem to have never found a solution. (outside of probably getting a whole new system, which I can't do at the moment.)

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!


Edit: Oh and before anyone asks, I only have 2 possible refresh rates that I can set, and its 59 and 60.

 

If it were me, I'd go see an optometrist and/or a doctor. A monitor should never make one light-headed and feel weird. Do those games flash a lot?

 

No not really...and it was never like that until I had to change some settings (something was making the game crash).

I just don't think it's my eyes since it only happened after I changed some settings...I mean I play a lot and have never had this problem.

 

I just had my wife surf around a bit to see if she noticed anything. She experienced the same thing...like it wasn't nice to look at and it was hurting her eyes.

 

That's a relief, can you return the video card to default settings? I remember when I set the gamma on my aging monitor pretty high, it wasn't pretty. You've got quite a few options on that monitor and hope you didn't change any of those.

 

Contrast ratio and refresh rates can also have a significant impact. I stare at monitors all day and over the last 3 months have also noted "significant eye strain".

Sadly it is a factor of modern society as well as respective settings......I spend 7.5-8 hours a day in front of monitors....I come home and want to game or use the net for "social" purposes.

Our eyes are not "evolved" to cope with the amount of interactivity we have on a PC (retrospectively speaking) and eye exercises and or glasses need to be considered.