Widescreen monitor question

My system is a homebuilt Athlon X2 4400+ (1MB L2) OC-ed to 4800+ specs. I
recently bought a Dell 2007FPW 20-inch widescreen monitor, great for my work
and for watching DVDs, but not so much for gaming. I'm not a huge gamer,
and that's probably a good thing in my case, because I've realized that some
of my games do not support widescreen resolutions (e.g., my monitor's native
1680x1050), so when I pick one of the "standard" resolutions (e.g., 1024x768
or 1280x1024) instead, the display is distorted because it appears
"stretched" across the whole screen. Is there a way to set the monitor so
that it doesn't stretch a standard resolution and instead just displays it
in a 1280x1024 area (for example) on the screen? (BTW, my videocard is a
GeForce 7600GS.)

Yes. Under "custom resolution" .. you may need
Coolbits to see it, but I don't think so ... set the
resolution to 1280 x 800. Most games will do
that fine, and you won't have that wide distortion.
You can drop AA to 2x or even OFF and the
"edges" will still look pretty good. Plus you
gain FPS in the game. All of my games work
fine that way. MOHAA, CoD, Syberia I & II,
Paradise, Far Cry, Doom3, ..... My monitor
is Viewsonic LCD VX2025wm .. also a 20
incher.

johns