I wonder why my new laptop always resets its screen resolution upon restarts??

I have a brand new laptop with a 17" widescreen, 1680 x 1050 resolution. I've taken to using the Hibernate option as opposed to Turn Off, because when I turn the thing on again, the screen for some reason resets itself to 1280 x 1024, and all my desktop icons are auto-arranged to the left side of the screen.

This is a pain in the ass because when this happens, the display settings max out at 1280x1024, and it won't let me go higher until I friggin' re-enable my second monitor (17" CRT via VGA). Once I reset that, then the laptop can go up to 1680 x 1050 again. Is there a logical reason this is happening? Anything I can do about it?

And this kind of leads to a second question: is there anything wrong with using Hibernate completely in place of Shut Down? I understand what Hibernate is, but is it okay to always use that option instead of officially shutting down the computer?

Thanks for any replies.

How ya doing, buddy?

Do you know what graphics card you have (and have you installed its latest driver)?
How many user accounts do you have on your laptop and does the account you use have full administrative rights?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600. There is only one account (my own, the administrator). This computer is less than a month old so I assumed the graphics driver was up to date. However, I will check Gateway's site now to see.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.