Windows 7 - Having issues playing games in fullscreen

hello, I've had my laptop for over a year now and been able to play games fullscreen with no issues until recently, I was playing a game and it crashed on me so i booted it back up and now suddenly I cannot play any games at all in fullscreen, which hinders my gaming, looking to see if anyone knows how to fix this, i've tried some methods people have posted when i googled the issue but none have them have worked yet, such as resolution changes and alt-tabbing, all of my drivers are up to date and everything worked fine until a few days ago when it stopped working suddenly. I have an Alienware M11x-R2 with i5 core and a nvidia geforce gt335M