11th Feb 2009
Recently got a new monitor that is capable of running at a higher resolution (1920 x 1440) than my old monitor (1600 x 1200) but the higher resolution was not avilable in System > Preferences >Screen Resolution.
The full range of resolutions was availabe in System > Administration> Nvidia X Server Settings but failed to save to the xorg.conf meaning that I would have to manaully change the resolution each time I started the computer.
My solution was to preview the changes that were going to be made then manually edit my xorg.conf through the terminal:
nano etc/X11/xorg.conf
A more GUI friendly way of doing it would be to run the Nvidia X Server Settings GUI with permissions that would allow the configuration file to be saved.
gksudo nvidia-settings
After making the changes and restarting the computer my screen resolution was still returning to default, but now at least the option of higher resoutions were now available in System > Preferences >Screen Resolution. Changing them there finally made them stick and also worked after a restart.