How to get 1920x1080 (almost) native resolution on Dell 22w LCD

A Dell Optiplex GX280 with onboard Intel 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset

There are two ways:

1. Use a modern Linux distro like Ubuntu - it detects the hardware properly and
works out of the box at full 1920x1080 resolution

or

2. Use a 'modern' MS Windows OS and cast your mind back to the early days of fiddling with Modelines in an Xorg.conf like you had to do in the early, early, early Linux days...

WinXP or Win7 didn't work even with Dell OEM or Intel drivers. The best it would do ouy of the box is 1400x1050 - it appears that the 1920x1080 mode I'm trying to achieve is disabled in the BIOS.

The XP solution. (probably have to do something similar to with win7 but on GX280 vintage gear probably not worth it) Anyway, get the real Intel driver in ZIP format.
Unzip it and edit the

.\win2k_xp142550\Graphics\igxp32.inf file

Go to the section
[NonEDIDMode_AddSwSettings]

Change the value of TotalDTDCount from 0 to 1
HKR,, TotalDTDCount, %REG_DWORD%, 1

Change the value of DTD_1 to set a FAKE but VALID screen resolution
Here's what I used
HKR,, DTD_1,%REG_BINARY%, 02,3A,78,20,71,38,2D,40,58,2C,45,00,DD,0C,11,00,00,1E,37,01

I'm using 1912x1080 - the BIOS doesn't know about the resolution and will not block it.

02 3a 80 18 - the 1920x1080 version
02 3a 78 20 - the 1918x1080 version

For details of what this is about is best explained here:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/custom-resolutions-on-intel-graphics/

Then, manually install the driver with the igxp32.inf file...