Thanks gnome. I didn't realize that was an option. I just tried it on a portrait oriented monitor and can say I like the "crisp" pictures. But after adjusting the text size, I still went back to the previous settings because the desktop icons are spread too far apart from each other, cluttering the whole monitor. I think it might work better if the monitor is displayed in horizontal mode. This was on a Vista pc. Thanks again for pointing this out.
Well, you can also adjust icon size, horizontal and vertical spacing. You can end up with everything the same size as when you set the monitor to 1024x768... and images will be sharper of course.