How to change the picture size on a Dell monitor?

Try this.

Open Display Properties...
Right click Desktop | Properties | Desktop tab |
Under Position, click the V to see the choces | Select Stetch |
Click Apply | Click OK

Position
[[Lists background display options. Center will display the image in the
center of your screen; Tile will repeat the image over your entire screen;
Stretch will stretch the image to cover your entire screen. ]]

Ronss,

Thanks for your reply. 

Unfortunately that doesn't solve my problem because that centers the screen saver in the middle of the blue background that fills the full width of the monitor.

What I am looking for is a way to reduce the width of the usable blue background that covers the entire screen.  I want about an inch of unused black area on each side of the background.  That gives a usable are that is more square rather than stretched across the entire screen. I wish I could insert a picture than might show what I have a hard time describing.

The deal is that I had  this at one time and I can't get back to it.  Frustrating.

Richard

Just a thought.  After you reinstalled XP, did you also re-install the video drivers ?  If you're using just default drivers you might not have all the possible settings.  

Not sure about integrated video, but many video cards have an aspect ratio setting in their particular software.

If anybody still cares I finally figured it out.  I knew I wasn't crazy.  Since I use Symantec Ghost I reinstalled an older version of my PC and checked out the monitor there.  I had the screen resolution set to 1024 x 768.  That gave me the aspect ratio I wanted with the magic black areas on each side.

While I was trying to solve this I consideredthat screen resolution and was just sure that was far too low to even bother trying.  Doh!!!

Richard