OK, this is just what I needed. I don't have an actual widescreen TV, but I did get a widescreen monitor that I'm really liking a lot. Now my laptop and my desktop both do 1280 by 768 resolution. Steve found some resources for making games work at the widescreen resolutions.

In messing around with all this HDTV stuff, I found is that most Xbox games snap into widescreen automatically. More and more, I'm doing my gaming on the Xbox. I'm spending more time time playing and less time tweaking.