Just bought my wife a new monitor. What are the effects of running it at a different resolution than is recommended. It's a ViewSonic LCD 22 inch monitor BTW.
LCD's only look sharpest and clearest at their native resolution, any lower resolution will be a little fuzzy or blurred at best. Set at the native resolution and use windows to change size of icons and text.
Using any resolution other then the monitor's Native (Read: Maximum) resolution means the monitor's onboard image scaler must re-scale your image to fit the screen. This means weird blocking/pixelation/odd colors sometimes.
I think if your eyes aren't as good anymore as they were once, and you've got small pixels on your screen.