New Laptop help desired

[Carlton Brooks]

I just purchased a Gateway P-6822 Laptop. I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on it 
and now have some issues.

First the laptop has a 17" WXGA screen. It has a resolution of 1440x900. 
When Ubuntu is displayed on the desktop the tool bars only cover about 
75% the width of the screen, though if a program is opened it covers the 
entire screen.
I have gone into the xorg.conf to look at the settings and do not know 
what to change if anything to take advantage of the wide screen.

My second issue is that I have no sound. I have read in the forums that 
I possibly need to reconfigure the alsa drivers. I have attempted to do 
so based on the Ubuntu forum recommendation but no luck I get errors 
when attempting to compile and do a make install.

Can anyone offer some direction to me.

Thanks
Carlton Brooks