Laptop resolution ineffective

I have an older Dell Latitude CPi running Win2K on it. All drivers have been updated. When booting up, resolution seems to be 640x480 for whatever reason. When it gets to the login screen, it's at its normal 800x600 resolution which displays the entire desktop w/o problems. When I try to up the resolution to 1024x768, it will work but you have to move the mouse further "off" the screen to be able to see the task bar. That is to say, you cannot see the entire desktop on the screen at any given time: the borders extend beyond the capacity of the screen.

So, is this a hardware limitation where my laptop's screen just *****, or is there some sort of s/w out there where I can fool the computer to display my entire desktop? Thanks!

 

Check again. There may well be 2 screen options. One for size of screen and one for size of display area. Make them match and you should see the entire screen at once. Unless there IS a hardware limitation of some sort.