Resolution Issues

Sorry if this is in the wrong place but I've been having trouble figuring this out and have always heard good things about this site. "Ask the Community" seemed like an appropriate solution.

Anyway, I've got a Dell Inspiron 9300 and I'm using a VGA cable to run it to an LCD Element TV/Monitor. The screen size of the external monitor and the laptop monitor are very close (2 inches or less) and they both "normally" support 1440x900. (The reason I'm doing this is because my laptop monitor is finally starting to sprout dead pixels and generally look horrible) However, I find that I can only get my laptop to send a resolution of 1280x800 to the external monitor. This results in the image being barely too large for the screen but it's better than the alternative of nothing appearing on the monitor at all (lower resolutions don't appear to be supported).

This is all fairly tolerable but I'm running into problems with my gaming because most games don't want to run at 1280x800. Most will attempt to run at 1024X768 and will be very small and tucked in a corner of the screen. I wouldn't be confused if my laptop normally couldn't display a 1440x900 image...but it can and does. Any thoughts on what could be going on here or how I could get the monitor to display what the box says it's capable of displaying would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

What does the laptop have for a graphics solution , is it intergrated or a discrete card. Remember you are dealing with a laptop not a desk top and there are restrictions to what you can acconplish with it.

found this link on dell for the 6800 http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/video/P82192/and in the user manuel there are three way to connect laptop to a tv.with this link http://support.dell.com/support/ed [...] /index.htm also there is a battery recall at this link http://search.dell.com/results.asp [...] srch=False

http://downloads.guru3d.com/DNA-Fo [...] -1783.html

Give these drivers a try.
Edited inf for most mobile cards.

@Rick

Thanks for the link. I'll check out the drivers and see how things go. I experimented with an edited inf driver before with a few positive results but it ultimately seemed to interfere with basic performance and stability (I crashed way more frequently). Hopefully that won't be the case here.

@scout

Thanks for the additional link. I've actually already tried fiddling with the monitor itself but it doesn't seem to produce any noticeable results. Good thought, though.