Monitor will not scale?

my e1705 lappie is weird... whenever i go to the nvidia control panel, disable scaling, and set my monitor resolution to a lower resolution (so that the black edges would appear). afterwards i would try booting up a game (WoW, CS source, or anything that would play/change the resolution) and as a result, the display goes completely haywire with lines running and flashing everywhere until i manually power down the laptop via the power button.

is this normal? i mean i was just messing around, testing stuff. but it seem a tad buggish to me... any reasons/solutions as to whats causing this?

/edit on a closer inspection, it looks like the desktop resolution is conflicting with the game resolution. are there anyone else experiencing this? or should i go raise hell over at dell's?

 

I noticed the other day that Dell's BIOS (I have an e1405) has a setting to automatically scale/expand resolution to screen size. It's by default enabled, and could be the reason why smaller resolutions look bad (they're streched to the screen size).

You might want to try disabling it and see if it helps your game run.

On another note, I've had my screen go haywire a couple times before. I believe it's a driver problem with my GMA950. It comes out of nowhere, but seems very very rare, and completely random.