Screen resolution during bootup

I was trying to reproduce the nice behavior I had on my old Sony laptop (running XP, but that's not the point). Namely, the boot-up screens - either the animation or the text-style info if the animation is disabled - would show in *their* native resolution (not sure if that was 640x480 or 800x600) in the middle of the screen. Once booted to Windows it assumed the full screen at its own native resolution (or whichever I may choose).

Now, with later computers I could not manage to do that. So now the boot sequence is using the full screen. What I do not like about it is that all images get stretched as they are not designed for 16:9 screens. As a result they look rather ugly, with the text stretched as well. It's readable, but I would be much happier if I could shrink it to a nicer form.

Not a performance problem really, the OS is running nicely, but it just annoys me . Any ideas?

Well, what I mean is that whatever the boot resolution is - 1024x768, fine, it's not 1920x1080 of my screen. As a result the original 1024x768 image is stretched full screen, whereas I would like it to use just those 1024x768 pixels in the middle of the screen instead. Same goes for BIOS screens, which are not even part of Windows the way I see it.

So this is not so much changing the resolution of the boot sequence, but changing the way it is shown on a higher-resolution monitor.

Right, but the fact is, I did see it done - on an old Sony laptop. I have no idea how though ...

Oh well ... The old machine was running XP indeed. But I thought that the way the BIOS screens are shown is independent of the OS. In that old case both the BIOS screens and the boot-up screens were shown in the same fashion.

My monitor is 1920x1080, and there is nothing stretched about either the BIOS or boot screens on my system. Therefore, I would suspect that the problem has something to do with your system settings (monitor).