Yeah, my monitor will only display up to 1024x768, even though I have added "1280x800" in my xorg.conf for 24 bit, which is my default color depth.

I'm on a Sony VAIO laptop. What should I do?

Did you come across the term "modeline" ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline

If you Google for modeline (and VAIO) you'll probably find a couple sample configurations that may work.

I downloaded the driver from nvidia, installed it (no patches needed, as seen in some howtos), and ran nvidia-xconfig, and it worked. Woop. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, though.

But if someone is searching for a fix for this, and has the exact same setup (Sony VAIO SZ), don't add the modeline from the ubuntu on linux howto, because it will mess shit up until you reboot. Just go straight for the driver install. Driver's at http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

I installed it with:

# sh /path/to/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8178-pkg1.run --extract-only
# cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8178-pkg1
# ./nvidia-installer -n
# nvidia-xconfig

replace the version number above with whatever the latest is ^