Laptop w/17" Monitor

One assumes that clicking the maximise button has no effect either ?

I have had a couple of 17" laptops including Macs and not had any problems with IE/Opera/FF etc... not being able to fill the screen.

I wasn't quite accurate in describing the problem. The window is maximized on the desktop, but the website info only covers half of the window, the rest is white space. Some of the sites are pushed way over to the left inside the window and some show up centered, but none of the sites cover more than about half of the available space.. I have a 15" screen and when I view a website with the window maximized the material inside the site covers the whole screen.
Hopefully it is as clear as mud now

Thanks

When you say a 17" screen are you referring to a normal 4:3 ratio screen or does her laptop have a widescreen (16:9) on it?

Well its a lot wider than it is tall so must be 16:9. Not sure how to find exact ratio of the screen. BTW in XP with an ATI display there is a place to go and change the aspect ratio (under display settings) doesn't matter, didn't fix it. I hate to think I have this nice wide display and can only use half of it

If you have a 16:9 screen then there prolly isn't much you can do about the situation. WWW pages are usually written with the intention of being sized for a standard 4:3 screen. You could probably find some utility to stretch the page out to fill the entire screen but I'd have to guess that the distortions wouldn't make browing a very pleasurable experience.

Most of the people I know of that use widescreens use the extra real estate to keep another window (or application) open and viewable.