Been having problems with my laptop's resolution for a while, so I thought I'd seek help from the only community I know.

Sometimes when I run a game that has a different resolution than my laptop's native resolution, the resolution will change the game will run for a couple seconds before the resolution reverts and the game is minimized. When I switch back to the game with alt+tab, the resolution will change again and revert back a couple seconds later, minimizing the game again. Restarting the game doesn't help and it's happened for quite a few games so far, so I always have to close the game from the task manager and keep trying in the hope that it will eventually work, though I usually give up before then. Any advice? I'm running Windows Vista, native resolution 1920x1200.

Your computer might not be able to support the resolution/color depth/refresh rate, see if you can edit some kind of config file manually to something your computer can handle.

It works sometimes and not at other times; in all cases, it's going to a lower resolution and I have no reason to believe it's beyond my computer's capability. It does it with super meat boy and warcraft 3 just as much as bioshock 2.