At least that's the way it feels! I just realized that my laptop supports 1600x1200 resolution! And I've been running it at 1024x768 all this time! So after fighting with the fglrx drivers for Debian, I can finally surf the web and read e-mails without having to scroll left and right all the time! Setting up fglrx was less than painless to put it mildly. For future reference, I had to do something like this:

aptitude install fglrx-kernel-src

cd /usr/src

tar jxf fglrx.tar.bz2

cd modules/fglrx

export KVERS=2.6.16-1-686

export KSRC=/usr/src/linux-headers-${KVERS}

debian/rules binary_modules

I would have hoped that m-a a-i fglrx would have worked, but alas... Oh, and other thing. ATI: it isn't cool to lock up the machine just because your driver doesn't support 16 bit colour. I had set my default colour depth to 16bpp previously in an effort to get higher resolution with the radeon driver, but when I started using the fglrx driver things would just lock up.