Resolution issues with 40" moniter. ;)

I sure hope someone can help me with my problem, cause i've been living with it for a while. Maybe this doesn't belong in the PC hardware forums, and maybe it does, but i'll ask anyways. I've been using my 40 inch Bravia TV as a moniter for my laptop. Whenever I set the resolution for the screen to anything above 800x600, I start losing some of my picture. The picture starts going beyond the borders of the screen so that I'm not getting the entire picture. When I set it to 800x600, the picture stays in the screen, but everything barely fits, and I have a 1 1/4 inch border on the sides and a 3/4 inch border on the top and bottom. It isn't a problem with my pc, because I have limited access to another tv that my computer fits into at any resolution. My roommate has a laptop that he plugged into the tv and he had the same results. If someone knows what is wrong with my tv, please help. Thanks.

maybe I should post this in the video/audio forums

You should be able to resize your image from your video control panel.

Besides the TV, the laptop needs to be scrutinized as well. Is it using 3rd party video drivers or the very generic Windows ones? What's the port used to hook up the TV and laptop? Also, what is the native res of the laptop LCD?

800x600 usually work for 4:3 screen SDTVs. It'll also be the only resolution available on an HDTV if you use an S-Video cable instead of VGA/DVI/HDMI. My Toshiba laptop has both a VGA port and S-Video for hooking up to either an external LCD monitor/HDTV or an SDTV.

If you used VGA/DVI/HDMI to hook up to an HDTV, the video should auto-adjust itself so long as you have the 3rd party video drivers installed.

Look for an option on the TV Menu for size and set it to "Just Scan" or "1:1"... What is happening is you TV isn't using all of the pixels and it is overscanning the image by making it larger...

I fiddled with my own PC and noted that you'll have to go to either the ATI or nVidia control panel and adjust the max res to match the desired resolution. If any black bars show up on top and bottom, that means you'll have to increase the refresh rate, also from the 3rd-party control panels. My 19" monitor for instance allowed me to drop to 1280x768. It also allowed me to increase the refresh rate from 60hz to 75hz and fill up the whole screen.

If you increased the res from the Windows Display Panel and the max res setting in the 3rd party panel is a smaller res, then you'll have the desktop spilling over the monitor boundaries.