It's rather common knowledge now that you can enable down scaling (if the hardware supports it) in Windows to increase resolution beyond the max supported by a display. It basically involves searching for every REG_DWORD Display1_DownScalingSupported and changing the value to one. The problem I ran into was I needed to do this to a multitude of different model netbooks and the key name changes between models since it is named by GUID. So a simple registry export/import wouldn't work on dissimilar models. Here is a simple batch file solution:

 @echo on

set KEY=HKLM
Set VALUE=Display1_DownScalingSupported


for /f  %%A in ('reg query %KEY% /v %VALUE% /s ^| findstr HKEY') do (
reg add %%A /v "Display1_DownScalingSupported" /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

The above will enable you to select 1024x768 on a system that only supports 1024x600. The aspect ratio will be off, but if you have applications that check for resolution requirements then this will get you past that. After the keys are changed the system needs to be rebooted.

This was successfully used on Dell Latitude 2100 and 2120 netbooks to get past the 1024x768 resolution requirement for the NWEA Locked Down Browser.