One other small question that I wanted to ask was about paint packages. As I do lots of graphics work and my graphics card is quite old now will I be able to keep resolutions like 1024x768 and still keep circles etc... looking like circles and not ovals on a widescreen monitor? Do they compensate for this sort of thing, I assume they do as you say you use SNES emulators and all looks fine.
Depends -- if you are using 1024x768 and have it fill the entire screen (default behaviour on most cards), it will be stretched on a wide screen and your circles will look like ovals. Some cards have the option of displaying the exact resolution without stretching, but in that case you'd end up with black bars at the left and right side of the screen.
But more importantly: *most* cards will query the monitor and find out what resolutions it supports, and you might find that a bunch of new resolutions pop up in your selection list as being available.
You might see a 1200x768 or so that has the correct aspect ratio and appear similar as the old 1024x768... but without knowing exactly what card you have, it's iompossible to say what resolutions it will support.
Bottom line: if you have to use 1024x768 and need circles to look round, then you really don't want to get a widescreen panel, but should get a 'normal' one instead.
The other thing to consider: images look significantly better in the native resolution of a panel (which is 1280x1024 for the majority of non-widescreen LCD's) than they do in a scaled down 1024x768 -- that one tends to look quite muddy and blurry around the edges since it's all scaled up, and it's not an even division either.
I used to always run my CRT's at 1024x768 (or lower, my old Voodoo3 had one resolution right in between 800x600 and 1024x768) but finally broke down and set up my resolution to 1280x1024 on my LCd simply because it looked like crap on 1024x768. Especially if you do a lot of graphics work, you're probably going into that.
(I did have to tweak a bunch of system settings like the font sizes, icon sizes, DPI, etc. for me to comfortable read everything at the 1280x1024, but the quality of the display is *much* better than scaling it down to 1024x768.)