Laptops in particular have lots of proprietary hardware. With Windows the
manufacturer installs these proprietary drivers by default. Some Linux
distros do as well, but Ubuntu is not one of them for philosophical reasons.
Ubuntu installs open source drivers by default.You can manually install
proprietary drivers, if one is available.

Judging by your comments, you are using a basic vesa driver which provides
minimal resolution. To load proprietary drivers in Ubuntu, go to System on
the top panel, Administration, Hardware drivers. If a proprietary driver is
in the repositories then you can install it. You may need to re-boot to
activate it.

If one is not available then you can install from the manufacturer's website
like in Windows, but it is not a simple matter for graphics drivers since
they need to be compiled for your kernel. If your card is ATI or Nvidia then
you can install a programme called Envy from the repos and it will build and
compile the driver for you. If it is Intel then you will need to go to their
site and build it yourself.

You can find out your hardware info by opening a terminal and typing: lshw

It will scroll lots of info quickly, but you can scroll back with the mouse
through it and look for the section with:
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller

If you copy and paste that section it will help us with troubleshooting.