New to calibrating... w/o DVD/Blu-ray player...

What source(s) do you typically use/watch on you TV? You'll probably need a DVD or (preferably) a BD player to be able to properly use the AVS disc. Using the USB input is not a good idea neither is the laptop unless you only want to calibrate for that specific use only.

If the patriot box office is your primary source for "reference" material then by all means grab the AVS709 mp4 files and use that as your source.

What I mean by that is content that you know is mastered correctly.

You can never really be sure what is happening with cable and cable boxes so you can't be sure that a video clip on TBS will look like the same video clip on FOX. But a Blu-Ray or a mpeg-4 rip of a Blu-Ray should look the same everywhere. So by reference I mean something that you know would look correct on a correctly calibrated display (as oppose to an unknown thing, like whatever the nat geo channel is broadcasting).

Several hundred discs (some editions of Avatar, Dances With Wolves, The Towering Inferno, Willow) are "THX certified". They have some test patterns (nothing to do with sound) you can use. I used Willow. Look in the "special features" menu.

(I just read that you don't have a DVD player -- but you have a laptop. Does it have a software DVD player?)

I don't know where I read about the THX test patterns, but I'm glad I did.

I think it helped me a lot.....

those patterns are not always accurate and sometimes only work for watching that particular movie

good idea, that should work for the OP