Widescreen laptop suddenly has black bars on sides of the display

[KellyFi]

Hello,
I have never had this problem with m Dell E1505 laptop....it has a wide
screen display and Windows has always displayed with the correct aspect
ratio. all of a sudden it is only using a standard amount of screen real
estate to display the image, with vertical black bars on the sides. I've
looked thru Display Settings and don't see anything that affects the aspect
ratio. I am set to 1024 & 768 resolution, and the same problem occurs at
800x600. any ideas? The only recent tweak was to install a web-based video
game for my daughter. I haven't tried uninstalling it yet.
--
Kelly, Seattle WA

[Mike M]

What is the resolution of the laptop? Both 800x600 and 1024x768 are 4:3
resolutions that would expect to be displayed with black bands on either
side on a wide screen display.

Checking with the Dell web site I see that the available resolutions for
an E1505 are 1280x800 and 1680x0105 (with TrueLife). Change to one or
other of these and you should find the bars go away and you get back the
use of your full screen.
--
Mike Maltby
MS-MVP Windows
mike....@gmail.com

[Jay]

I have mine on 1280x800 and it still has the black bars on the sides.

[Mike M]

What resolution are you running and on what hardware? Have you recently
updated or changed the video drivers?
--
Mike Maltby
mike....@gmail.com

[Qiqipandana]

I am using my brand new Dell widescreen laptop and I had this problem
yesterday after I installed my DDO game. Yes, I had the same problem with two
black bars on each side. 5 mins ago, I tried to re-set the game options and
it worked.

- Go to Game Options
- Graphic
- Choose "Resolution" 1366 * 768
- Apply

Then it worked for me. :) Hope the information is useful.