Windows 7: Windows 7 Display Problem - Black Borders

I delayed my installation of 7 until tonight... I had the beta and never had this problem. This is a clean install on a clean HDD from the DVD of win 7 pro x64.

After the install everything looks fine, I could tell it had it set on max res. Updated windows, intel infs, ati 9.11, symantec EP 11 the works. After everything was done it was time to customize and personalize my windows. First thing i did was try to lower the res because the monitor is quite far from my face and iam tired of squinting. As i changed the resolution the first thing I did was change 1680 x 1050 to 1440 x 900. I noticed something looks wierd... essentiall the screen res looks the same just that the screen area got smaller... changed it lower to 1280 x 800 and the same thing happened. Went in for a closer look and noticed the res is the same just the viewable screen area just shrunk.... Tried to fix and research the problem and found out alot of people were having the same issue. After 2 hrs I am lost. If i input res of 4:3 that takes up the whole screen just stretched wierd but if i enter widescreen res of 16:10 it just makes black borders. It seems alot of these problems did not get solved mostly because they were not able to explain it correctly and I figured, I should take a picture, it would help explaining.

I am sorry if the solution has been posted elsewhere, if you can provide me a link it would be great.

Picture1: max res 1680x1050
Picture2: 1440x900 notice the black borders of dead space
picture3: 1280x800 notice the black borders of dead space
*Red line drawn to show actual screen/lcd border
*purple line drawn to show rendered border by windows 7

It maybe a scaling / stretching issue where it is not stretching correctly.
I tried manually removing the drivers as well as a physical removal of those drivers from windows and windows\system32 and windows\syswow64

Thank you for your input

If you have aan ATI card...

I had a similar problem with my HD 4850 when switching from vista to Windows 7. I actually found a fix inside the ATI Catalyst Control Center.

Open CCC and somewhere in the display configuration for your monitor ensure that there is no over/underscan. For some reason my CCC had a small degree of underscan turned on which led to the black bars you mentioned.

A word of caution, when you start your games up and pick the native resolution the underscan may show up again. Just turn on any options for windowed mode and/or full screen and then turn off windowed mode again and the black bars should go away. Hope that helps!

wow, yes...
for some reason they made the new CCC interface so complicated, everything looks so hidden and coudlnt get to those settings until i tried to play with it some more. Everytime I opened up CCC before it went straight to the display resolutions and I thought hmmmm maybe with windows 7 you cannot change your graphics settings (which is true, i still dont see any options where i can adjust quality or performance of my graphics card such as anti aliasing, antrosomething filtering, 3D etc... ) BUT at least i got the resolutions to display correctly, it is a step into the right direction.

Thank you reghakr

No problem