Alright, I just installed suse 9.1 on my Inspiron 2650 and things were looking chipper as the installation was flawless - that is except for when I had to choose my video display settings.

Currently everything boots up fine at 800x600@16bit color, but that isn't the native resolution of my laptop screen. I have a geforce 2 go and under the windows install I am able to run it at the native 1024x768@32 that it's supposed to.

I went into YaST Online Updater and updated the nvidia drivers, which actually made the screen fit onto the whole of my display (before it was this tiny little box). Great. However, it's still at 800x600. So now I go into YaST control panel, login as root, and try to change the display settings. I first tried to change just the resolution, but realized that I had to change my monitor settings.

It's currently under VESA 800x600x32. I tried changing it to 1024x768, but upon finalization, it just froze my computer (can't ctrl-alt-backspace, or even press numlock) causing me to force a shutdown and cold boot again. I have tried other settings, etc, but it always crashed. Am I doing something horribly wrong? Please help!

You might try changing your monitor under yast2 to one of the dell laptop displays. I think you said yours was a 1024X. My inspiron 1100 did not like the versa monitor setting either, but am using the intergated intel chipset. LOL