VGA screen resolution limitations

[Winfrey]

Last night I was over at a friend's house for a small LAN party. Around midnight, right as we were about to play Crysis, my monitor starts to flicker from my desktop to a black screen. After I fiddle with the DVI cable some the video isn't transferred to the monitor at all. Suspecting the cable I found a DVI->VGA adapter so that I could connect my 7950 GX2 to my Samsung Syncmaster 20" 204b via a VGA cable we had lying around.

This Worked fine but I noticed the picture look quite a bit more crappy. I noticed the resolution was set to 1280x1024 instead of 1600x1200 which is what I normally have it set at. When I change the resolution back to 1600x1200 the screen is squeezed and shifted to the right. Is VGA only able to support 1280x1024 on LCD's? Or am I missing a step here? I'll probably pick up a new DVI cable soon, but I would like to know why it doesn't work correctly.

[Winfrey]

I was able to use 1600x1200 after A LOT of tinkering with the monitor settings with respect to V-position and H-position and picture coarseness and sharpness. It is much more workable now. It still isn't quite like how it was with the DVI. But it is functional now.

I still don't understand why when I switched cables the crap hit the fan though.