Display woes

[AtlasDark]

As a requisite, I've gone through numerous articles (used Google extensively on my problem before asking) though I'm not able to solve my problem.

In the case of both my laptop (polycarbonate MacBook) and desktop (an aged Dell), Fedora Core, Ubuntu, and Slackware overshoot my native res by quite a bit, leaving me with a desktop far larger than my screen. I don't believe that I need to touch restricted drivers and my resolution is already set to native, the distros even recognize the correct system info (save for the distros on my MacBook running via Parallels).

The LiveCD's did not experience this issue - how do I alleviate my problem?

[r-ID]

You have a destop who scrolls when you touch the corner of visible desktop? play a bit with desktop options, and that should be fine

[AtlasDark]

It does, but that's a rather irritating method of coping.

I've messed with a few settings and managed to break video detection (took a few boots in low-graphics mode to fix the mess) and I've also managed to get the screen to something below native res, though it leaves black borders.

[tgoe]

I've had a similar problem and here's how I fixed it:

Hold down ctrl+alt and hit - and + on the numpad to cycle through resolutions. Then I guessed the setting from that and screenshots. probably not the best way though