Am I Missing Something Obvious Here?

[fish2ways]

I've used Ubuntu on and off for a long time. 7.10 was great. I've just installed 8.04 on a spare machine.
No problems with install. I was prompted to install the nVidia proprietary driver and that went without a hitch.
Restarted and was overjoyed to see a resolution of 640x480!!!
I managed to work out that my monitor wasn't being recognised. I opened the Main Menu editor and selected (using my keyboard because my mouse pointer just threw the screen up and down when I tried to select anything)+ Screens and Graphics in the Other category. Closed the editor and then opened Screens and Graphics from Applications/Other. I was then able to select my monitor from the options and get a sensible resolution.
So back to my question. Am I missing something obvious here? Is there some fantastic new, super simple, setup option that I've missed?
I don't think so.
How is a new, or Windows, user supposed to know how to do this? Why should anyone have to?
They shouldn't.
Screen and graphics resolution was a breeze in 7.10 and in virtually every other recent distro I've used.
My main machine runs Slackware 12 and that was a piece of cake to set up compared to Ubuntu 8.04.
If this is a bug then the thing shouldn't have been released till it was fixed.
A new user will just give up and badmouth Linux/Ubuntu. Is this how we attract them?
Looking at this forum I'm not the only one who's experienced this.
Now blame nVidia as usual.

[CamaroSSMan]

I've used Ubuntu on and off for a long time. 7.10 was great. I've just installed 8.04 on a spare machine.
No problems with install. I was prompted to install the nVidia proprietary driver and that went without a hitch.
Restarted and was overjoyed to see a resolution of 640x480!!!
I managed to work out that my monitor wasn't being recognised. I opened the Main Menu editor and selected (using my keyboard because my mouse pointer just threw the screen up and down when I tried to select anything)+ Screens and Graphics in the Other category. Closed the editor and then opened Screens and Graphics from Applications/Other. I was then able to select my monitor from the options and get a sensible resolution.
So back to my question. Am I missing something obvious here? Is there some fantastic new, super simple, setup option that I've missed?
I don't think so.
How is a new, or Windows, user supposed to know how to do this? Why should anyone have to?
They shouldn't.
Screen and graphics resolution was a breeze in 7.10 and in virtually every other recent distro I've used.
My main machine runs Slackware 12 and that was a piece of cake to set up compared to Ubuntu 8.04.
If this is a bug then the thing shouldn't have been released till it was fixed.
A new user will just give up and badmouth Linux/Ubuntu. Is this how we attract them?
Looking at this forum I'm not the only one who's experienced this.
Now blame nVidia as usual.

Thank you so much, I am a Windows user first trying out 7.10 and had a lot of graphics problems. I had to resolve an intel integrated nvidia pci card that hadn't been fixed since Hoary 5.04. I guess they just don't check the forums! I think all they do are updates to programs not "fixes", but again I am new.