External display settings confused?

Hi, I have a new Macbook Pro - very good but it seems to get a bit confused when I have it plugged into an external display.
With it mirroring the screen - it will say that it's running at 1440x900 on the Macbook Pro and 1680x1050 on the external 22".
However it's definitely running at 1440x900 on the external - is that because it's not possible?
When using it in lid closed mode it can happily run the external display at 1680x1050.
Am I just a bit confused?
Yours,
Chris
Message was edited by: Monkeey - wrong OS version!

No-one got any ideas on this?

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Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.

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this is from another discussion:
jk10003
Re: MacBook doesn't sleep when closing lid with external monitor attached with Lion Oct 14, 2011 7:01 PM (in response to admgtz)
I would like to offer this solution. I have a MacBook Pro with an external monitor, and, for a year and a half both displays slept when I closed the MBPS. This behavior stopped when I installed Lion. They would sleep when I removed the power cord, but what a pain that would be. The command "pmset -g assertions" gave no indication of which process ought be preventing sleep.
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https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190417?start=165&tstart=0
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Correct AnswerRe: How do I tell Lion to disable the LCD screen even when the lid is open?
Aug 31, 2011 9:56 AM (in response to Bob_viking)
Here's the command to make your laptop behave like it did Pre-Lion (courtesy of my friend):
sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0"
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Message was edited by: robert170

only if you plug in this projector again. If you plug in a new projector (which I often do) it allways starts in "mirrored" mode.
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Message was edited by: robert170

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The infrastructures in OS X to resume from sleep, to authenticate, and to change displays is fundamentally not working.
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I've also gotten the laptop to become confused about whether it is asleep or awake. When I open the lid, it seems to enter into sleep mode, but closing it seems to bring it into an active state.
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External display settings confused?

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