The only way 1024 x 768 will look any good is by displaying it centered on 1280 x 1024 screen.
which begs the question "why bother going to a lower res?"
my mum's laptop was god awful on anything other than native (but it was from 2000 with winME) more modern monitors work like CRT's these days instead of trying to make a rez that isnt divisable by 2 from its native res by just having 4 pixels to one it might end up 2*2 and 1*2 alternating which just sucked
startopia did the boarder trick and looked beautiful
hogs of war got stuck with the odd even pixels and was unplayably ugly
im running at 800*600 due to distance of monitor and me and its fine i did try net at 1024*768 but i prefere this
on a side note sainsburys have an LG 42" tv with vga in ... so tempted but its £700 which is part of my dentist money