5punk

Today the nice people at the rental company took away our aging telly and brought us a shiny new flat one. I noted with glee that id has a VGA plug on the back.

The problem is that it's only giving me a 4:3 box. The extra desktop space is there, but I have to scroll to it.

Any ideas on how to acheive widescreen loveliness on the telly? I didn't think it'd be much of a problem, what with the laptop being widescreen too.

Find out the resolution of the flat screen.
Find out the maximum resolution of your laptop.
If you are using Nvidia graphics, then download the new beta forceware drivers, which has a very good control panel for "flat panel scaling".
If you are using ATI, ask someone else as I haven't a clue.
If you still get stcuk, you could always fiddle around with PowerStrip and the vga cables resolution to identically match the flat panels, with scaling enabled, and then that would make the text look best.
I'm not an expert on PowerStrip though, so hunt around their forums for info, as there are charts somewhere where it tells you what each make/model of screen should be set to within PowerStrip for best results.
My main guess on why your problem is occuring is that your res on the laptop is higher than what the screen can handle and it's not scaling down properly.

Hmm. The Laptop's native res is 1200x800, and the telly's is 1366x768.
Google says something about DDC, but that's for ATI's Catalyst and this is and SiS Shit-in-a-bag onboard.
I'll give powerstrip a go.

powerstrip is your best bet. ATi's drivers aren't the best for unusual configurations.

Assuming you have a widescreen resolution try this...

Go to Nvidia control panel, select the monitor/tv, go to device settings -> device adjustments

There a several different options in there to determine how the monitor handles different ratios, you might want Monitor Scaling

I think this is the same as what Woo said. maybe.