upgrade lcd to higher resolution

I am looking for some advice on switching screens. I have a 2 or 3 year old dell with an awesome 15.4 inch lcd that I love and I recently bought a replacement acer laptop with a 1280x800 screen. I want to, if possible, put the wuxga screen into my new laptop. I removed both screens and switched them, they physically fit the housing and the monitor connectors seemed to fit. the power cables also fit into the inverters fine.
When I powered up the new laptop now with the 1920x1200 screen, it boots fine but the display seems grainy and very washed out.

I could not switch the power inverters between machines due to the different connectors betweent the laptop MB and the inverter.

The video in the new laptop is the intel 965 chipset that can drive 1920x1200 fine on an external monitor.

Is my problem more likely due to not maintaining the screen/inverter pairing or is it possibly a different monitor cable pin arrangement?

Thanks for any input, i'm relatively new at messing with notebook hardware.

 

The inverter controls the power to the ccfl which provides the backlighting for the lcd.

"Grainy and washed out..."

Washed out implies overexposure but I can't see a ccfl being so bright that it washes out your screen. I can't guarantee mixing and matching inverters is safe other than to say, if it lights and the dimmer works, then I guess it works. I'm assuming you adjusted the resolution and updated your drivers.

I don't think it's a lcd cable pin arrangement issue either as that would more than likely prevent it from working at all, so I'm leaning toward a difference in specs between the mobo and lcd.

.

 

Noterev, Thank you for the input. Yeah, by grainy and washed out i mean that the blacks weren't totally black and the whites not totally white. The screen looked as though maybe 1/3 of the pixels simply weren't operating properly.
I did adjust the resolution but I did not update the drivers since it was driving 1920x1200 fine on my desktop monitor.
If I find out something that works I'll give an update.

 

The drivers may be using the default settings for the orig. lcd, which may not be optimal for the replacement. You may need to play with the settings. OTOH, as I said, it could simply be differences in spec.