DISPLAY RESOLUTION/SYSTEM.INI PROBLEM

I was asked to look at a home computer my frriend was having trouble with. He was getting a SYSTEM.INI error during startup and couldn’t get to windows. I went to MS one thing led to another and I ended up “creating a new SYSTEM.INI without using third-party drivers (Q140441)”. I was very proud of myself when the pc went through startup and went to windows! All the programs worked and he hadn’t lost data. We did a thorough scandisk and a disk defrag and all was good. When he took it home and hooked it up, the resolution was stuck on 16 bit. He tried reinstalling the monitor driver, but that didn;t help either. Please help and keep in mind that neither of us are really computer literate (i don’t know what the heck I am doing!!!!) Thank you.Russ.