I'm In Need of Some Real IT Help!?

Re: Older Laptop 鈥?Dell Inspiron 8100; running Windows XP SP2; P3 with maxed out RAM at 512MB. Computer runs fine with the following exception.

Problem: Screen Resolution Issues

When the laptop is set at max resolution of 1280 X 1024 the viewable area of the monitor is full width and full height.

However, if you lower the resolution to say 1024 X 768 the viewable area becomes much smaller and has a black border around all four edges about 1陆 inches wide.

If you further reduce the resolution to 800 X 600 the viewable area now becomes about 7鈥漌 X 5鈥滺 with large 3鈥? black borders all around.

I figured a repair install of XP would fix the problem, but since the XP disk is 8 years old, the version on the PC with all the Microsoft updates is consider a newer version and XP won鈥檛 allow me to do a 鈥渞epair鈥?installation.

My only options would be to format the HD and reinstall from scratch or uninstall all the upgrades and perform the repair install.

Any viable suggestions?

I'm In Need of Some Real IT Help!?noton

Older Dell's have this problem. Its been my experience that this is driver related but usually updating the driver isn't enough. Doing a driver rollback and then upgrading to a driver available on Dell's support page should do the trick. Easiest way to rollback a driver is right-clicking "My Computer" and click managed. Click device Manager and find the video adapter (not the monitor). Right click and select roll-back (roll-over) driver.