All of the photography forums seem to agree that while you can get a monitor set-up for colour by eye with reference images such as http://www.monitorsetup.com/ which does assume that you have a set of photographic colour reference cards you will only get an accurate colour, or color depending where you are in the world, profile by using a hardware solution such as DataColor Spyder currently ranging from €109.00 to 259€ for the monitor calibration tools.
Checking for Dead & Hot Pixels is usually a matter of looking carefully at the screen while displaying, full screen, pure Black, White, Red, Green & Blue pages/images but again there are hardware tools used but magazines and manufacturers that consist of a very expensive camera which you have to know has no dead/hot sensors and a resolution at least twice that of your screen.
Checking Viewing angle is easily done by moving round the screen but for accurate results you would need hardware costing thousands.
For checking Geometry I suggest using images from a site such as monitorsetup and a straight edge such as a ruler.