With a Latitude D630 and a docking station I have an extra monitor. The Latitude has it's own resolution which I can change but the extra monitor stays at 640X800 or whatever Safe Mode gives you. I can pull the slider to higher resolutions but when I apply it then it snaps back to 640x480.

I had another monitor on it last week and this monitor did whatever I wanted it to do.

The video card is the Nvidia Quadro on the laptop.

Why won't the resolution stay even up to 1024x768?

Sounds like a driver issue. I recommend that you try to re-install the full driver suite from NViDiA's web site.

Check the driver of the monitor, if the system doesn't get the EDID information for a monitor it will do screwy things like this to the resolution.

Interesting thought. I haven't had that problem in years. You still see this in the wild?

Yes, but in the last case it was "by design", but a bad cable, bent pin, could cause it also.

I have some training labs that the projector is driven by 5 wire vga BNC connections and there is no EDID info. So Windows 7 and XP report something different for available resolutions depending upon the video card installed. I have had some only supply 640x480, or 1024x768. In the end we created our own INF that sets the resolution to the one we want and manually install it on the systems as needed.

Went out an bought a 24" screen flat panel and plugged that into the dock and everything is alright now and is customizable. Some of these D630s also have the Intel Crestline graphics cards too. I guess they are better than the Nvidia Quatro.