What are these black lines on the side of my computer screen?

Question

So I was playing this game, Ghost Recon, and suddenly my computer froze. I removed the disk, rebooted, and everything's working ok except for some reason there are these thick black vertical lines on each side of the monitor. It makes everything smaller. What is this? Can I get rid of it? It makes me nervous; this is a brand new lap top.

Answer 1

Most likely, the crash caused the video drivers to reset or change to the default settings.

Go into display properties and reset the resolution to a widescreen resolution.

Usually, it's something like 1440 x 900.