Great thanks. That link made me realise that I was going about things the wrong way.
For any other noobs such as me who come accross this:
When enabling Desktop Effects (System->Preferences->Desktop Effects) shortly after installing Ubuntu, I was prompted to install nVidea 3d acceleration drivers (or some such). This I did, however, I could not find any decent screen resolutions when trying to set my screen res which led me to believe that I needed to download a driver and install it.
This was my mistake. The driver was now already installed and the screen res issue was a separate issue altogether. For me, this beautifully simple solution did the trick:
http://davidwinter.me.uk/articles/20...ers-on-ubuntu/
All the best
Dominic